← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave
00:58:35
Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap...
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- [00:00]
Harry Stebbings
$4 billion to $50 million market cap. Today I have the founder of Dave, one of the US's leading neo banks on the show. In 2022, they spake and went public at $4 billion. Excitement soon waned though, and their market cap dropped to just $50 million.
- [00:19]
Jason Wilk
All of our pipe investors from our IPO bailed before a mockup expired. Fintech became a bad word. Spac became a bad word.
- [00:27]
Harry Stebbings
They lost an incredible 98% of their value.
- [00:30]
Jason Wilk
I had no. We were, we were.
- [00:33]
Harry Stebbings
But the turnaround has been one of the best on Wall Street. They've increased market cap by over 900%.
- [00:40]
Jason Wilk
The investments again in AI is really what ledge a lot of the profitability.
- [00:44]
Harry Stebbings
Is there anything you would have done differently about the process?
- [00:47]
Jason Wilk
Honestly, I don't regret going out via spac. I think we just went public too late.
- [00:51]
Harry Stebbings
You went public too late.
- [00:52]
Jason Wilk
I think the company realistically was ready to go public six to 12 months earlier and.
- [00:59]
Imran Khan
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- [03:59]
Harry Stebbings
Jason dude, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. I'd heard so many great things from Imran and from Ash. So thank you for joining me man.
- [04:06]
Jason Wilk
Yeah, thanks Harry. Great to be here.
- [04:08]
Harry Stebbings
Now I would love to start. You sold your first business for $85 million reportedly. I'm just always oscillating on the fact that do richer founders make better founders? I think this a lot with investors. When you think about it, do richer founders make better founders?
- [04:24]
Jason Wilk
I'd say yes. I think about this quite often. If you were to have a blank check VC fund and you just wrote a check blank, not looking at the idea, uncapped convertible note into every successful exited YC founder for their second company, you'd have probably one of the best VC funds on the planet. I look at some of the guys on my own YC class because that company I sold was in was in Y Combinator. My second company was Dave, the founder of Open Door. He had a small real estate company he sold to Trulia Stripe was in my class. They had sold a previous company for like $6 million. Some eBay tools. Business amazing. The swing for the fences that some of the Second time founders go for once have a little bit of money in their pocket who otherwise were went a little bit more conservative the first time around.
- [05:06]
Harry Stebbings
I remember meeting Eric Gliman from Paribus at the time, just after he'd sold it to Capital One, and he was like, I'm about to start something in the fintech space anyway, I'll tell you more soon. And he then founded Ramp a month later.
- [05:21]
Jason Wilk
Another great example, Great example.
- [05:24]
Harry Stebbings
What is that, though? Is that like the financial safety that comes from having a first exit is that having seen mistakes that you've made before, what is it you think that gives you that unfair advantage on the second or third time?
- [05:35]
Jason Wilk
At least for me, I mean, probably the same thing for guys like, for Paribas and a lot of people in my YC class, we weren't willing to swing for the fences given how little capital we were raising back then. So this company I started was in 2009, was the YC batch. I was in 2009 or 2010. And we had to fight tooth and nail to raise a $300,000 seed round. I mean, now you raise $300,000 in. In, you know, every minute you're presenting at the YC batch announcement. But it was so difficult. I mean, Mark Cuban was our first check into that company that wasn't even a result of Y Combinator. I had to try and convince him and convince him for a year to get this small amount of money. And back then, Mark actually capped my salary at $30,000 a year until we could get the company profitable. Like, that's how different it was back then to raise capital.
- [06:25]
Harry Stebbings
That a good move, do you think? Like, now that would be considered like Vulture vc. I love Mark. You love Mark. So I don't mean that badly on him, but that would be considered really bad form.
- [06:33]
Jason Wilk
There's no way that would happen again today. But honestly, it was an amazing forcing function to try and build a profitable business and not raise too much capital. We never actually raised any capital beyond the seed round as a result of that. So it taught us just a lot about persistence and perseverance to try and come up with a scalable business model without burning a lot of capital, without hiring a lot of people. And interesting enough, the $30,000 salary cap led to me overdrafting my checking account a lot, which pissed me off enough to start Dave as my next company after this one. So in a funny way, it sort of led us to that. And then Mark ended up leading the the seed round for Dave as well. So it was really an interesting story.
- [07:10]
Harry Stebbings
Why did you not do YC for Dave? You did it the first time, why not the second time?
- [07:15]
Jason Wilk
We actually were willing to do it the second time. Not willing. I mean we, we would have liked to do it the second go around because it was so different. Yeah. Back when I did YC in 2010, it was still Paul, Graham and Jessica. Paul was still cooking us dinner in a crock pot, serving us like vegetarian chili on Tuesdays. It was a much smaller group. Mark Zuckerberg would come in and talk to 20 of us. You get the Google founders coming in. It was this really intimate experience. But it was also a different time when this angel investing was starting to gain momentum again. Going back to how hard it was to raise the seed round. Our demo day was very unsuccessful from a YC standard perspective. And so to go back in and get a bigger check, mind you, the check size was only $17,000 back then for 6%, not whatever it is today. I think it's a couple hundred thousand dollars. So 17 grand bought them. 6% of stripe. Pretty impressive.
- [08:06]
Harry Stebbings
Can I ask you, when you reflect on like the thing that you did very deliberately and strategically differently the second time with Dave that you really think is a case of I learned my mistake or the lesson from last time and I applied it with Dave, what would you say that one or two things is the difference?
- [08:23]
Jason Wilk
This time around was really swinging for the fences on a bigger problem. I think the first time around I was going for a niche business, something that I knew we could get profitable quickly. So from that sense it was a little short sighted. We never could build a really massive business and we didn't want to raise a lot of additional capital either. One, because it was hard. And two, I didn't like the idea of sitting behind a bunch of preferred equity, given this was sort of like my nest egg. I knew that every dollar of cash that the company generated was 40% mine and I really wanted to protect that. The second time around I had some money in my pocket. I had a real bone to pick with a major industry. I looked at every major industry to try and go, try to disrupt banking had the most personal pain point with. And so I think the second time around was really just having a lot more confidence in myself, confidence in the ability to fail and go for a much bigger idea. And going against the banks was sort of a perfect time with all this new technology coming out like plaid that we were partnering with, given we had.
- [09:18]
Harry Stebbings
So many companies raised so much in 21 and 22. Do you think we have a founders, a group of founders that are generally pretty fucked given the size of the pref stacks that they have to claw back to?
- [09:28]
Jason Wilk
Yes, I do. The amount of capital that some of these companies have raised, a lot of them copycat companies too, like that never should have been getting capital. I mean people, you should never go out and try and build a company as a copycat where you have no real skin in the game or no real bone to pick with the industry. Because these companies take a long time to build. Like they take everything. And so it's weird to try and raise a bunch of money to go emulate something else we have no passion for. Just because it's the spur of the moment, it's the hot thing of the time. There's that issue. You have a lot of unpassionate founders. The second is because of the press stack. It really kills their optionality. I mean there's a lot of companies that we would have probably bought by now that are very small but have raised a couple hundred million dollars of prep and so makes their inevitable outcome impossible.
- [10:15]
Harry Stebbings
There must be a time though where that realization comes home to roost, so to speak. And when you say I know you've raised 200 but I'll give you 20 and you'll be grateful, does that time come?
- [10:26]
Jason Wilk
It will come. It just has not come yet. I still think people, there needs to be more time for the capital to burn. People need to actually run out of money for that to happen. And because the amount of money that people raise, they've been able to make it last much longer than otherwise in previous years past.
- [10:41]
Harry Stebbings
Who's the one saying no, they're out of interest? Because as a venture investor, I know how we operate. If you're not in my home run basket largely, you're kind of not interesting. And those companies that are kind of struggling to get to their pref stack, honestly for venture investors, especially us minded upside maximization ones, they're just like who gives ship, mistake, move on.
- [10:59]
Jason Wilk
Yeah, I guess we don't find a lot of VCs going around trying to sort of just get their money back because your industry is such a home home run hits driven business that it's not that interesting for them to try and break even on something. They're putting much more of their focus on the the 10-20x investments that are actually going to return the fund.
- [11:16]
Harry Stebbings
So it's the founders then who are saying no, we need to bluntly get back to the pref Stack and they're the ones turning down the offers.
- [11:21]
Jason Wilk
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
- [11:23]
Harry Stebbings
You've had so many interesting elements to the journey. One I really wanted to dig in on and one that I'm thinking a lot about. Why does anyone go public today? In a world of extended private markets where we have such large capital supplies willing to come in and extend that window, why does any private company want to go public today? How do you think about that?
- [11:43]
Jason Wilk
Well one, there's the dynamic of there's too much pref capital going out there, which I would argue is not great for founders. And so the benefit of being public is you erase all the prep. We have no preferred equity on our cap table, we have no debt in our business. We we trade $100 million a day of volume which means we have great liquidity to have employees get liquid on their their equity. It's a real rich person's not problem. But it's a rare error for companies like a stripe to be in where they have a true public comp. In an adient there's really no point in them going public because they have such vast access to capital for secondary markets. But that's only a select few companies. If you can be one of those businesses and not have to be public because you have such a clear comp, you don't need to have the distraction to live with of being public then sure, but I think that also works well if you're an enterprise business. If you're a direct to the consumer company like Dave, I think you leave a lot on the table. And for the potential retail swing that the investors can drive, the people that are really passionate about your brand. Tesla I'd argue would not be a trillion dollar private company but because of sort of the, the cult generation they've developed, the Tesla owners that buy the stock, they're the ones that have pushed it above and beyond any reasonable EBITDA multiple that they would be trading at as a private company. So I think it depends if you're enterprise or consumer and depends if you have great public comps or not. And it also depends if you have that access to the capital markets that you do, which I'd argue very few companies have that luxury.
- [13:10]
Harry Stebbings
I completely understand that. Hey, it's a game of the 1% who have the luxury to do that. I think there's actually an argument to be said that even a stripe of the world would benefit from having the pref stack removed. Something that's always questioned is the ability to make long term bets if Public. Given the short term nature of a lot of Wall street, do you feel as a public company CEO, you're able to make long term investments that are best for the business in the long term, but might have material costs that aren't obvious in the short term?
- [13:37]
Jason Wilk
I would say because of the turndown that we had to weather, our focus on longer term bets certainly pivoted towards doubling down our focus on our core product offering, making that best in class, improving the margins. And so a lot of our long term focus on new products was overshadowed. We are now finally getting out of that. Now that the is unicorn valuation again, we have real volume in our stock. We've gone through one of the most difficult times of my life to get us back here. And so we have some exciting bets that will ship later this year and into 2026 that we're excited about. But had that not happened, those product bets would have probably already be here in market today, going a little bit.
- [14:16]
Harry Stebbings
Back from the turnaround which we're going to cover. I mean, it's just such a wild story. You must look at it now and just go like, oh my God, thank.
- [14:23]
Jason Wilk
God, I'm through that not enough time has passed. So I'd say, you know, I'm not, not feeling like we're through the woods yet.
- [14:30]
Harry Stebbings
You chose to spac. Why did you choose to SPAC versus traditional ipo? Help me understand that.
- [14:36]
Jason Wilk
I still think that the concept, the structure of a SPAC still makes a lot of sense. You know, you, you get to raise a guaranteed amount of capital, at least through a, through the pipe, at a valuation that is set versus an IPO process. You don't really know how much capital you're going to raise. You don't even know what valuation until you reach the market making process at the very end. And that's an arduous process, right? It's nine to 12 months of work to build the S1, not to mention all the stuff you have to do to build out the finance, compliance, accounting functions to get there. If you're a younger company going public on the earlier side, the SPAC is an amazing vehicle to give you a lot of confidence. I know I'm gonna raise this much capital, I know it's this much dilution. And in our situation, we had a, a top tier investor that was meeting the, the pipe. We felt very comfortable and if not for the quality, the lower quality of companies that went public via that vehicle, I think you would have seen this be a much more pervasive way for good Companies to go out.
- [15:30]
Harry Stebbings
So if SPACs are actually a more functional and efficient mechanism than people give them credit for, why have they been so ridiculed? And I mean today obviously we're both operating in this ecosystem. The word SPAC is almost a poisonous word. Why is it so badly tarnished?
- [15:46]
Jason Wilk
Just the sheer amount of low quality companies that went public via that. I mean access to capital was when you went to this zero interest rate environment when access to capital anyone could, could raise. You were having companies with barely any revenue, barely any business model that were going public via this structure. And it really overshadowed the great companies that went public that could have also done a traditional ipo. And I think we were one of those companies that we could have easily done a traditional ipo. Sofi could have done a traditional ipo. There are great businesses out there that want public via SPAC that didn't have to and I think we need to sort of separate that out.
- [16:17]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think we'll see a return to SPACs as a mechanism to go public given their efficiency and as you said, predictability of price?
- [16:24]
Jason Wilk
If you can get a high quality company to, to go out to reset the stigma, I think you could possibly, you know, save that being a real, a realistic way to go public. And it's honestly, it's too bad that it's gone away because again, I think it is a, it is a real way to go out.
- [16:39]
Harry Stebbings
Is there anything you would have done differently about the process when you review it now?
- [16:43]
Jason Wilk
Honestly, I don't regret going out via spac. I think we just went public too late, to be honest. I mean we saw it well public too late, too late, too late. I think the company realistically was ready to go public probably six to 12 months earlier. And we were waiting. We wanted to find the right sponsor. We were trying to ensure a few things were, were right within our sort of how we were forecasting our business. And so we decided to wait a little bit longer. We went public January 2022. The market completely fell apart. April 2022, before our lockup even expired, all of our pipe investors from our IPO bailed. Before our lockup expired. Fintech became a bad word. SPAC became a bad word. Unprofitable growth company became a bad word. We were sitting in the worst possible place of all time. Had I gone public nine months earlier, we would have had the chance to raise potentially more capital. We would have been able to turn over our earlier shareholders to bring more longer term capital in. Like we never would have gone to a $5 billion valuation of 50 million market cap overnight. It wouldn't have happened. We would have had actual insulated support with analyst coverage. We had nothing. We were just a sort of a sitting duck. You know, some call it like a fallen angel, where you have no pathway back even if you build a good business. It was. It was tough times.
- [17:54]
Harry Stebbings
I mean, you are in the center of shit there. Respectfully, as you said, all the challenging elements coming together. I have to ask, you said about the pipe, investors not being there, does that piss you off? And I mean that nicely, but, like, investors not being there to support you in the hard times is a frustrating thing when you have relationships and you kind of feel like you've earned it.
- [18:12]
Jason Wilk
Yeah, it does piss you off. You know, I actually called some of these investors before going out, and I said, hey, the market looks choppy. Why don't we do this as a private round? And their response was, don't worry. Stock goes down, we're going to buy more. We're here to support you. And within a matter of weeks, they were out. I had no support in my stock. We were fucked. And they had a decent amount to do that.
- [18:32]
Harry Stebbings
So we have this moment where we're like, okay, we're at the center of a load of challenging tailwinds. The Stock goes from 4 billion on IPO to 50 million. Jason, that is unlike almost any other experience that a CEO will go through. What did your mindset tell itself, and how did you actually get through that? Just personally, forget the rah, rah, the troops bullshit. Like, how did you cope every day?
- [18:56]
Jason Wilk
You know, you can't look. You couldn't look. I mean, it was so depressing to see all this value that you had accrued erase overnight. A buddy of mine texts me over the situation and he's like, look, it was never real because you guys never even got to the mockup. You know, you never actually were possible to sell. By the time our lockup had expired only six months after going public, the stock was already down 90%. With no fault of our own, right? We had a ton of capital in the. In the bank. We had a great business. And his response was, it was never real. So there's nothing you can really worry about. All you can think about is the path forward. And as a founder, that's all I could do was talk to the team about. We had this. This statement that we delivered to the company around patience and performance. Like, let's just keep our heads down. The best companies ultimately go public if we perform and we're persistent, we're going to eventually see people turn around and start to buy the stock. Thankfully, it did for me. I never started the company to make a lot of money. I started the company because I believe in this mission to sort of level the financial playing field for everyday Americans paying all these overdraft fees in their account. I would advise any founder to really double down on having a very set mission for the company because it's a really important way to recruit people to bring them into the company. Even when our market gap went down 98%, the amount of people that left the company during that time was so small because people weren't here to make millions of dollars. That's a byproduct of the mission being successful. What we did, though, to incentivize people was we issued a bunch of performance stock units that were way out of the money. You know, we said, look, market cap, market cap's 50 million bucks. If we get stock price from $1 to $5 to $20 to $80 to $100, you're gonna hit all these new targets. And I think we probably minted more millionaires at the company as a result of the performance stock units than we did in the actual IPO process. And so the people that did leave actually left a lot of money on the table because those performance units were quite valuable at the end of the day.
- [20:50]
Harry Stebbings
Does it make it mentally easier for you knowing that you couldn't sell? I had an IPO of one of our companies, and similar to you, it was a SPAC and it went from 8 billion to zero. It actually went to nothing, dude. But it was in the lockup. There's nothing I could do. It does actually make it a little bit easier for me because it. It wasn't an option. Does it make it easier in your head?
- [21:10]
Jason Wilk
That's, I think, the only thing that got me through it because it wasn't like there was a moment in time where I had the ability to just go get a hundred million dollars. Like it wasn't a realistic opportunity. I never had that because the stock dropped so quickly that there was ever a chance.
- [21:24]
Harry Stebbings
I'm so sorry to be personal, but I think these things. And does a marriage suffer in those times? Like, we hear work, life, balance and, you know, you have all of the bullshit that we hear today. That is the most intensely stressful time. Do you see that wear and tear on a marriage?
- [21:39]
Jason Wilk
I've got a fantastic wife. She was incredibly supportive through the entire process. She always believed she was actually a seed Investor in the company, $50,000 check into the seed round. It was only only ever seed investment. So I think she's up like 100x on that particular deal. But she was a believer. She stuck by my side. And I think the one benefit of being in la, it's not a very tech heavy hub. You know, my golf club by Plaid has no tech founders and so I was able to sort of escape and not sort of be surrounded by it at all times. I think also being a virtual company helped. Helped as well.
- [22:11]
Harry Stebbings
You said about solving the problem for everyday Americans. One thing I often think when I see a lot of funding rounds is wow, this is developers solving problems for developers in Silicon Valley. And I'm not belittling that. That can be a very big company. But do you think that Silicon Valley adequately innovates for population that is much broader than purely them or do you think not?
- [22:33]
Jason Wilk
Certainly when we started the company, no. It was so hard to raise capital for Dave. Even though we have these amazing results. Going back to the concept I said earlier where investors had never heard of an overdraft fee, that was a real thing for us to raise our Series A, even though we had our CAC was $5. We had this amazing growth going on at the company. I think I took 120 meetings for our Series A. That was back in 2017, 2018, so before like things really got crazy in venture. It was hard. People did not understand.
- [23:03]
Harry Stebbings
120 meetings for your Series A. Yeah, that's right.
- [23:06]
Jason Wilk
And we ended up raising the Series A entirely from one investor who it was actually more of a healthcare focused fund. It was really just a result of one of our board members saying trust me, this is a good idea, it's going to work. And he wrote us the check. Pretty interesting times.
- [23:20]
Harry Stebbings
What was the check and what was the price?
- [23:22]
Jason Wilk
It was 10 million on roughly 40 was the price. And we took that all the way to a billion dollar valuation was our next or next round on our Series B. And actually we only raised 60 million in primary capital prior to going public. I mean we were just incredibly capital efficient. Always a small team. I kept that sort of profitability mindset always from my last business. We had this sort of good balance between profitability and growth. Yeah, 60 million to get to public.
- [23:49]
Harry Stebbings
It's the thing I really can't get my head around as an investor. I try and analyze patterns and I interview many, many great founders and so many of the great founders, from your UiPaths to your Klaviyos to your service Titans of the world honestly had exactly the same experience as you couldn't raise hundreds of meetings. And then there's the flip side where it's like the hottest companies continue to be the hot companies and they go on this soaring trajectory that is unstoppable. I always try and think like which is the, the more common path to success. One thing that was critiqued was the movement into crypto. How do you reflect and think about that in the pathway?
- [24:24]
Jason Wilk
We never really get asked about that. You know, I think at the time crypto, I still believe in the foundation of blockchain, the ability for things like stablecoin to move money. I still think there's inherent value in Bitcoin is doing to show stored value within digital currency. At the time though, the move was actually heralded. I mean we had this big partnership with ftx. That's when our market cap reached its all time high, was when we announced that partnership and they wrote us a $100 million convertible check into the company. It was sort of boom time for crypto. It was boom time for Neobank and thankfully we never actually went live with that partnership, but we wouldn't have launched it anyways because of the path to profitability. It was a distraction which ultimately we had to sideline a lot of our initiatives to just double down on really. AI was what we ended up moving more of our focus to.
- [25:11]
Harry Stebbings
I'm in deals with FTX now and they've been an absolute fucking nightmare. To be blunt, demanding cash back really being very difficult. Were they difficult with you in terms of needing cash back post sbf?
- [25:21]
Jason Wilk
Well, our situation was a little unique because it was a convertible note so we owed the money back no matter what. It wasn't an equity investment that they made into the company. And so we did benefit quite greatly from paying them back early. That note was not due until 2026 and I think it was last year, January, we paid them back $71 million as opposed to the, you know, at the time of repayment would have been probably 109 or 110 million. So pretty accretive transaction. And I think that also sent this really strong signal to the market last year because we hadn't yet announced our first profitable quarter. And so when we were willing to part ways with 70 million of cash, I think people realized that we were about to start to show some pretty explosive numbers in that period before we.
- [25:59]
Harry Stebbings
Moved to the turnaround, which is just incredible. Is there anything you did that looking back, you think strategically I wish we.
- [26:06]
Jason Wilk
Hadn'T Done that, honestly, I think I would have rather just doubled down on the core product more closely from the onset of the ipo. I think we just have so much room to run in that core business and the real unlock around how AI could impact our business. We started investing in AI years ago as a way for us to impact our underwriting. Now. Dave was a, we were a pioneer in cash flow based underwriting. The first company to partner with PLAID to access connected account information as a way to use for short term credit underwriting, if that was the thing that we unlocked. And AI ended up being the perfect solution to analyze cash flow data to underwrite risk for consumer credit. And fade to 2025, we're down to nearly 1% loss rate underwriting a younger subprime consumer for short term credit. It's been pretty amazing. And we also now have 80% of our customer support inquiries are driven by AI. And so both of those things I would have much rather doubled down on versus going into things like crypto, which were not as core to the product to improve what we're doing for everyday Americans.
- [27:10]
Harry Stebbings
When we look at the turnaround, 50 million to now, 1.13 billion as of today, I'm forgetting the date, but this is recorded when it's 1.13 billion. There's kind of two ways to turn it around. Reduce cost, increase revenue. Business can be more simple than people think. When we look at the first, reducing cost. What worked that you did strategically there to reduce costs so effectively?
- [27:35]
Jason Wilk
You know, there was the cleanup of some contracts. Like we had some legacy agreements with our networks and our processors which we improved. All of our infrastructure costs we could improve. We fortunately never had to do any riff. The result of profitability was never because we had to lay people off. We were 300 people of the IPO. Dave is 300 people still today. The investments again in AI is really what led to a lot of the profitability reducing our support costs considerably. But it was really the AI innovation within underwriting that unlocked a ton of leverage in the business.
- [28:07]
Harry Stebbings
We think about AI on underwriting and customer support. How has it changed the margin structure of customer support for you? You know, we always hear like oh, AI changes customer support. And I'm always like great, cool. What's the actual impact?
- [28:20]
Jason Wilk
Well one, it's actually a better NPS score around the experience. If you want to talk to, you know, typically this, this would be the same for most banks and especially, especially neo banks in the country. Most sort of call center support is going to be offshore that's going to take some time to get to. We, you can interact via chat, but mostly that support. They're looking at a FAQ list to derive the response. AI is able to quickly ingest all that, get you the answer you're looking for within a matter of seconds. And so we actually get better scores for a fraction of the cost because I think it's. It probably costs us 2 to $3 per contact if someone wants to talk to an actual agent at least. And so when you think about the cost reduction of someone interacting with an AI agent that costs literally nothing. I mean, that alone is going to be pretty impactful. We don't have an insignificant amount of people that are contacting support each month just to understand what their approval limit is. You know, how do I access this part of the, the app? It's pretty, it's, well, not pretty. It's very impactful.
- [29:16]
Harry Stebbings
Have you then removed people from customer support or just not hired new a supplemented existing? What does that kind of resource allocation look like?
- [29:26]
Jason Wilk
We've always had an escalation team that sits domestically. That team's been the same size, but we've also keep in mind, scaled our customer base 2x since then, so we've kept the same size team. We've had less reliance on the outsourcing because more has gone into the AI support. So there's been no sort of staff reduction at the core team in the US but it is less reliance on these sort of offshore companies.
- [29:47]
Harry Stebbings
On the underwriting side, I actually met an underwriting AI company the other day and they were selling to one of the biggest providers in Germany and they were like, hey, you've got 180,000 underwriters. They're one of the biggest. Basically, we can get rid of them all in six months. And they looked at it and they were like, fuck, no way are we rolling this up. That's like recession in Germany because of this whole program.
- [30:07]
Jason Wilk
No way.
- [30:08]
Harry Stebbings
When you think about how AI changes underwriting and what that actually means, how do you think about that?
- [30:13]
Jason Wilk
That I've only been thinking about it in one way is what's the consumer benefit to this? And the benefit is more credit approvals and higher credit limits are approved because of AI. When you think of how we do it, Dave, if you want to access credit within minutes of joining our app, that's sort of our, our, you know, our, our key go to market for the company, our ad. If you see it out for Dave, it's get up to 500 bucks in five minutes. Or less. We can do that because a customer comes in, we have them link their existing bank account via Plaid. And Plaid gives us access to six months of a customer's past transaction history. We have 12 million connected accounts roughly on the platform at this point. And so 12 million accounts times six months of account history and then we get a connection on an ongoing basis. We have access to nearly a billion transactions. When we launched the business, it was just a rules based model. You know, when do you get paid? Our confidence, your ability to keep a positive balance over a certain amount of time. Our loss rates when we started the company were north of 10% and at that time we were only offering people $75 of credit, the average being around 50. You fade to 2024 at the end of the year reported the average amount we're giving out is 180 and our loss rates are 1.2%. You think about the power of AI analyzing that cash flow data, it can look for commonalities in what makes up a good credit quality customer or a bad credit quality customer based on where you work, where you shop, even types of ATMs are there clusters of fraud around certain types of areas. You can start to suss out areas of risk that a rules based engine would never be able to get to that AI can quickly analyze. And because Dave, we're an overdraft product or an overdraft killer, the duration you're actually borrowing money from us for is very short. So you're going to utilize our product for five to 10 days on average. We're getting to maturity on the entire loan portfolio so fast that the AI is constantly able to teach itself what it did good and what it did bad versus, you know, a long term installment loan company that may use AI, but they're not going to know the efficacy of that model until six to 12 months in. Our model actually learns every couple of weeks. And so the power of that's resulted in more credit per user. At lower loss rates you generally see the opposite. To drive better loss rates you usually have to pull down your credit limits. We've actually seen the divergence of that and it's really, really powerful.
- [32:38]
Harry Stebbings
I'm fascinating. You said that it started at 10%. Loss rates moved down to 1.8. I think you said that 2, 1.2 was the industry average out of interest.
- [32:48]
Jason Wilk
I think north of 5%. And it's huge. I mean going back to the levers for profitability when you are originate, I think we did 1.6 billion of originations in in the fourth quarter every 10 basis points of loss rate is going to, is going to result in significant amount more margin into the business. And so we've been able to improve our gross margins on Dave from at the Low Point in 22. We were in sort of in the mid-40s and our, our gross margins in Q4 were 72%.
- [33:15]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think like JP Goldman, Pictae, your biggest providers, do you think they're able to incorporate AI efficiently and fast in a way that they will need to?
- [33:27]
Jason Wilk
It's just very different. I mean how they would integrate AI the way that it works for us. Our whole business revolves around having a very lean and digital first cost structure. When I think about how the incumbents are operating their business, they have a legacy problem. And you've heard the JP Morgan consumer CEO talk about this Marianne, in that it costs them $300 per year just to break even on a basic checking account. And so if you're not a consumer that is using a Chase Sapphire card or has a mortgage or uses Chase Private private client, the only way they can make money off the younger consumers or the lower income consumers is by charging heavy minimum balance fees and heavy $35 overdraft fees. That's the only way to recoup your cost. When I think about a company like Dave, we have no bank branches, my annual cost to serve is nearly 40. And so I can offer a vastly superior product at a fraction of the cost and still generate 72% gross margins. Our checking account is free, we have no overdraft fees on the checking account. Our cost to access credit is only five bucks if you want to borrow $100 at Dave. And so that experience compared to paying $35 for access to buying a cup of coffee on overdraft at a major bank is so vastly superior. And then that ultimately drives the low cost drives of low CAC because people tell their friends about it and our acquisition is 30% word of mouth. So it drives this flywheel that I don't think the big banks would ever be able to catch up to. And I think they will ultimately seed on the lower income and younger consumer. And instead you're seeing the bigger banks doubling down on more of the private wealth, higher end clientele where I would say the banking system is actually quite good in this country. It's really for the 50% of Americans that are earning less than $100,000 a year, paycheck to paycheck, overdrafting their account a lot. They're the ones that should not Be banking with the incumbents because it's just too expensive.
- [35:21]
Harry Stebbings
Listen, I'm a vc. I'm paid to surmise very grandiose statements from little data and project it with a lot of confidence. When I think about that, the kind of common statement is this and it's simple. Banking for poor people is a bad business. Is that wrong?
- [35:35]
Jason Wilk
I think people had that stigma early on when the company was burning capital. But we developed a really, this is part of sort of the turnarounds. I don't want to sort of jump the gun on the story here, but we developed a very crisp message to the street, which was that I would advise any founder to figure this out for themselves is you're building a highly scalable technology platform. At what point, whether it's a user metric, a revenue metric, does your platform actually become profitable? Because what is so great about technology companies, you should have a lot of operating leverage built into your business. It doesn't need infinitely more people to support infinitely more customers. Right. And so we had this message to investors into the company as well that Once Dave reached 2.1 million monthly paying members, that the platform would reach profitability. And every member that we added thereafter, because we didn't need to add more headcount to Service the next 2.1 million monthly paying members, we would reach significant profitability. And so when we hit that number in Q4 of 23, we had our first 10 million of EBITDA or profitable quarter. We've since compounded user Growth through 2024 we had 2.5 million monthly paying members in Q4 of 24 and we generated 33 million of profitability and fade to 2025. We've guided for the year to achieve 110 to 120 million of profitability. And so you really start to see the, the teeth of the operating leverage built into these businesses. And so banking for, I wouldn't call it poor people. I'd say banking for people poorly served by incumbent banks is an amazing opportunity because you can bank them with a highly scalable, highly efficient platform that is inexpensive to, to operate because of that drives very efficient cac. And so it's actually an amazing business and most people missed it, except people like Imran that put money in at the, at the moat.
- [37:22]
Harry Stebbings
People often say to me, Harry, you sure you're not Israeli? Because you have the directness of an Israeli in an English voice. So I'm sorry for the directness there on that one. And there are economies of scale that make the business better, I think about seven powers. It's the best book that anyone can ever read on business. And it basically states seven powers that create sustaining defensibility in a business. And one of them is economies of scale. Essentially the more that it's used, the better it gets, so to speak. There are economies of scales this where at 10 million you're able to offer better x more or why?
- [37:54]
Jason Wilk
Because of scale that I would point again back to the underwriting. So because of the high velocity of this extra cash product where people are borrowing money for a very short period of time. With Dave, we've actually issued that product 130 million times at this point. People use it 130 million times. So the more that the system actually sees those positive repayment behavior, you're going to ultimately start to see better loss rates. And that results again in higher credit limits per user. And so it drives this flywheel of success. And so there's absolutely an economy of scale. And with all of our service providers and our networks, the more customers that we get on the platform, the cheaper our cost to serve actually gets. And so it enables longer term profitability there too.
- [38:35]
Harry Stebbings
I have to think as an investor about distribution of gains and outcomes in any given market. And I had Nick from Revolut on the show and he said that kind of the next generation would see really the consolidation of banking providers. Five global banking providers absolutely dominate and be trillion dollar companies. You'd see the removal of kind of localized banking and these kind of global players would dominate. Do you agree with that statement on the consolidation of banking providers and five or six taking the majority of market share?
- [39:04]
Jason Wilk
I don't know about five or six players. I do think though that there's an interesting time for someone to build a global Neobank. I think Revolution's doing a really nice job. I think Nubank's trying to do something similar where because you have these digital first tech stacks and you have banking as a service built into more and more countries, Plaid is now in 14 countries. You can start to build these sort of global banks and then with things like Bridge and Stripe with sort of this, in this innovation around stablecoin you can start to get rid of sort of this cross border currency friction that doesn't exist and you could finally build a global bank. I just don't see a major incumbent like a Chase or a B of A doing that. But I could see a, a digital bank taking that on and being quite successful.
- [39:47]
Harry Stebbings
The thing I don't understand is US shits on Europe really in everything. Let's be honest in terms of size, size of company, size of market cap, size of people. And my question to you is not in banking. Again, Revolut is $60 billion. Now I don't know what Chime is quite. But it's what, 15 to 20. What help me understand genuinely I never get this. Why is the US smaller when it comes to Neobanks in Europe?
- [40:13]
Jason Wilk
It's yeah. So sorry to cut you off but I mean it really is the different markets that we're serving. And so I think I said earlier in the call the, the banking market for people making over $100,000 a year, if you keep enough money in your checking account, if you have a pretty good credit score, banking is not so bad. You have access to pretty good products, pretty inexpensive products. The you have access to a mobile application to manage your money. You can get access to a financial manager. Like it's not, not bad. It's the poorly served customer that's not making a hundred thousand dollars a year that is not able to maintain that minimum balance. That's the market to disrupt in the US it is a massive one. I can't say what Chime is worth at this point but Revolut is going after a different market. You look at some of the countries are super successful in. They're going for markets where the main banks don't even have a mobile app yet. They're actually becoming the first digital, first mobile application for a broad swath of consumers there. If you go talk to Nubank, they're not actually banking the lower income consumer in the country. Like banking's actually screwed up for everybody. If you were to talk to David Nubank's CEO, he's going to tell you that his customer base in Brazil, in Mexico is actually a middle to higher income consumer. It's just a very different opportunity that us and Chime are disrupting in the market where there is just this systemic legacy issue of how the banks are not built to serve the lower income population. Well here in the US and that's still a massive opportunity. And could one of us be a $60 billion company? Like certainly.
- [41:38]
Harry Stebbings
But that's interesting because that's kind of contrarian in the way that most people think. Legacy banking providers globally but in the US as well actually don't provide that good a service. It takes a long time for them to respond. The customer service is not great. Quality of ancillary products isn't great. When you look at a lot of what Revolut does, from stock trading to crypto trading to insurance, to esims, to travel insurance. These are like financial super apps versus a chaser, a Bank of America. You're saying that actually no, they're pretty good.
- [42:06]
Jason Wilk
They're actually pretty good. When I think about the go to markets that Revolut is solving for, sort of the cross border currency friction like that isn't. That's not really a thing in the, in the U.S. like the need to open up an account very quickly on a, you know, on a mobile app. Like we have that here in the US that doesn't exist in a lot of the countries that place like Revolut is disrupting. And you've seen a lot of the European companies try and be successful here in the US they haven't. I mean they've consistently tried to come here and retreated because their product offering is just not a fit for the US at least in the way they go to market in these other countries. Just to show you how different the two companies are, I mean Revolut is.
- [42:41]
Harry Stebbings
Going for the banking license in the US as we speak and going full on to get the U.S. do you think they'll be able to.
- [42:48]
Jason Wilk
It depends how they're going to try and attack the market. But we have not seen this sort of super app mentality be successful here the way it's been successful in other countries where there's just a lot less competition.
- [42:59]
Harry Stebbings
I would say if you were advising Nick, say I'm Nick. And I said, you know, Jason, I'm not going to put it on his accent because he'll kill me and I sound like a Bond villain. But you're advising me. I'm entering the US market in three to six months. What should I know and do? Having your advice, having seen what you've.
- [43:17]
Jason Wilk
Seen, I would just look at all the different types of customer segments and pick the one that is the most poorly served by the existing brand, the existing competition. I think companies like Dave have done a great job in Chime to build a significant penetration in the market. We're at 12 million customers. Chime I think is, you know, at a similar type of penetration. Cash App's done a good job. They've got 50 million people using their product. Like he would have to think about this population as something that he needs to build an attractive product for because I think it's going to be an uphill battle. Unless he wants to spend 500 bucks on customer acquisition. Then maybe you could go after the the incumbents.
- [43:51]
Harry Stebbings
I specialize in asking basic questions. You mentioned they're having the Same customer bases as in terms of volume or number, as like a chime. Why are Chime more valuable then?
- [44:01]
Jason Wilk
We've just taken a very different approach to building our businesses. Our focus for Dave has been building a sort of a credit first Neo Bank. You can download our app. We specialize in AI underwriting to get you approved for credit within 5 minutes of joining. Chime's taking a very different approach, being very methodical about wanting to be your primary bank. They want to make sure that if you have any value in their product that you need to be a direct deposit member of their app. And we just find that to be a, a very expensive value proposition to sell to consumers because in my view people don't wake up in the morning excited to open up a new checking account. It's very cumbersome to go switch all your bills over, figure out who you need to pay. It's a new strange bank relationship. Whereas with Dave we get to know you and try to get you to switch over time. I'm going to give you approved for a couple hundred bucks. When you join, we give you the Dave debit card to try us out. We're going to give you some benefits to help you earn some extra money if you take a few surveys here and there and then we're going to ask you to direct deposit over time. But my CAC is $16 because I take this speed to value approach where I want to make you a happy customer immediately. Chime's taking a very different approach where it's a no fee account. They're very conscious this is a bank account you're opening and that they want you to be a long term user or this may not be for you.
- [45:15]
Harry Stebbings
It's so funny that you're more common or similar to Revolut than you think because that's exactly the Revolut approach we had obviously Nick on and he says no, I want it to be like a snack. I want you to use it for your holiday and go I like this. And then your second holiday, I like this even more. And it's good. And to your point, it's a lower CAC when the entry point is that. And over time you have more and more snacks and it becomes the meal and you actually then move as a result of that and it's kind of an entry wedge into the real win.
- [45:45]
Jason Wilk
That's our approach. I think if you want to raise a couple billion dollars and spend a couple of billion dollars on marketing, you can do this direct deposit. And I think Chime's done a good job. They've, they've raised the most capital, they put the most capital to work again. We got to IPO with 60 million of primary capital because we've taken that snackable approach to build this relationship. But I also think from a long term competitive advantage between us and the neobanks, the data set we're building around this AI underwriting is going to be such a leg up when we start to get into additional forms of credit. I think we're so early on in our monetization as a business given we just offer basic checking and an overdraft product called Extra Cash. But if we wanted to get into any other forms of lending, we have such an advantage by using this AI cash flow data.
- [46:26]
Harry Stebbings
What form of lending do you not do today that you would like to do that would be most transformative?
- [46:31]
Jason Wilk
We see a lot of overlap with things like buy now, pay later. We know our customers aspire for that. Our extra cash product because it's so short duration, people tend to use that for gas, groceries, rent. But if you wanted to buy a airplane ticket or books for school or T shirt like these discretionary items, people are not using Dave for that, at least from a credit perspective. And we like to think that we can be there for you in every potential point in your credit journey as a, as a customer.
- [46:58]
Harry Stebbings
What's your boldest bet on the future of the NEO banking ecosystem in the us? When you look forward to the next three to five years, what do you think is very clear that many other people don't see?
- [47:09]
Jason Wilk
The big thing people miss was the inherent operating leverage built into these fintech platforms. Like they're so scalable, especially with AI. And so as these neobanks start to compound user growth beyond what it costs to pay back the cost to build their platform, there's just, these are great businesses. I think people really miss that. It's, that's one, and then two, the ability for the NEO banks to get deeper into credit and use their expertise there to disrupt the legacy costs there because there's just still such expensive credit for consumers out there, compounding interest. Credit cards are terrible for consumers. They're incredibly expensive. They're not great products. If you use them to buy things for long duration and you're just paying off a minimum balance, the fees you're paying are massive and it's like $3 trillion of credit card debt sitting out there that people are just revolving and paying too much money for. So I'd love to think that Neobanks can leverage their low CAC and their cheap operational structure to start to eat into the fee structures that the bigger banks are also getting fat on.
- [48:07]
Harry Stebbings
Final one, before we do a quick fire, is Trump better for business owners than the Biden administration?
- [48:12]
Jason Wilk
Yes.
- [48:13]
Harry Stebbings
Why?
- [48:14]
Jason Wilk
Well, just his approach to less regulation in general. Again, this is less of an overhang for companies just to focus on building true, innovative products without the need to constantly feel like they're going to trip some government wire. You know, I don't know that the government really understands this customer base. And you see the things that they try and push forward, like 10% cap on credit card APR. Like, do you realize what that would do to credit card approval rates? Like, the reason why people charge what they do for risk is because there's risk. And the second you take away someone's ability to monetize just means they shrink the funnel. So it's like, great job, you capped rates. You just kicked a bunch of people out of the credit card ecosystem and now they've gone to like, go take out payday loans or something. It's just not a. It's such a headlined win for a regulator that doesn't actually take in mind the end consumer. The same thing goes for around trying to cap overdraft fees. What I said about the JP Morgan CEO around the cost to serve statements, that was directly related to, if you get rid of overdraft fees, we're just going to jack up the cost to maintain a monthly account with us because we need to recoup our cost to serve somehow. And so it's another one of those, like, regulator wins where great, you know, headline, no more overdraft fees. But guess what? The banks have now increased cost for a monthly account fee and now no one gets approved for overdraft, which is a lifeline for everyday people to go get gas and groceries. It would suck to get stuck at the gas station just because a government regulator wanted to get a headline win. When I needed this money, like, screw you.
- [49:42]
Harry Stebbings
I saw the 10% APR and I was like, I don't know if they actually understand how this world works. You're going to get like loan sharks who are really dodgy having thriving businesses because of your regulation.
- [49:53]
Jason Wilk
Trump's going to help get rid of that. We just need to get rid of the grandstanding and really try to think about what is going to be the best thing for the end consumer. And that's where I go back to. There's enough competition in this space where you can't screw the consumer because they have. They have enough options.
- [50:08]
Harry Stebbings
I want to move into a quick fight.
- [50:09]
Jason Wilk
Jason.
- [50:10]
Harry Stebbings
So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
- [50:13]
Jason Wilk
Yeah.
- [50:13]
Harry Stebbings
What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
- [50:16]
Jason Wilk
The one thing that we. That I probably regret as a founder in sort of this. This business was with venture capital dollars, the big push to hire seasoned pedigreed C suite executives. Not as easy as it sounds. Very difficult. I would really question every founder who's trying to overhire too fast in the C suite. Be very careful who you bring into your closed circle.
- [50:37]
Harry Stebbings
That's so interesting. So would you not hire them at all and you grow internally or just wait for later?
- [50:42]
Jason Wilk
There's scaling issues by having some of your junior team try and get into more senior positions over time. I would just be careful how you meet these people, get to know them over time. Don't make rust decisions and just be sure that they truly align with your culture and your vision because they can be very disruptive to your culture. But they also can be very disruptive when they leave because people don't like seeing C suites leave. So there's. It's a very important decision. I don't think pedigree should be your necessary filter because one company success does not mean it's going to be successful for you.
- [51:13]
Harry Stebbings
Which competitor do you most respect and what do you take from them?
- [51:17]
Jason Wilk
I would say a lot of respect for what Revolut's doing. I think they're, I'd almost call it like regulatory as a service. Their ability to just go into these different countries and set up operations is pretty remarkable. I mean, if I could snap my fingers and repeat that capability. I think our products are needed in more than just the U.S. but the superpower, they have to be able to go in all these countries and do that quickly I think is pretty impressive.
- [51:40]
Harry Stebbings
You can buy and hold one stock for 10 years. What stock do you buy other than Dave?
- [51:45]
Jason Wilk
I haven't looked at the most recent stats on just overall retail penetration, but I think Amazon is still pretty small when it comes to owning the overall retail market. I still think that's a pretty good stock to own for for 10 years.
- [51:57]
Harry Stebbings
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
- [52:00]
Jason Wilk
I'd say more 24 months. But you know, the shift to profitability was probably the only thing I thought about for. For a solid two years.
- [52:07]
Harry Stebbings
And how have you changed your mind?
- [52:09]
Jason Wilk
Sorry, it's just a philosophy shift in doing that. When you're going from a growth at all cost mentality which everyone's pushing you for, to go to a profitability at all costs. Like it's such a major mind shift. It's such a shift for the entire company. That was probably the hardest thing and the most, most thoughtful thing we've had to do over the last couple of years.
- [52:24]
Harry Stebbings
Which consumer brand do you respect the most?
- [52:27]
Jason Wilk
Apple. Aside from maybe their delay on AI, they just build the most polished consumer product and they have a great, well respected brand. I think it's everyone I think aspires to reach the level of polish that Apple has been able to develop.
- [52:40]
Harry Stebbings
What's the biggest short in the public markets?
- [52:43]
Jason Wilk
I don't feel comfortable asking, answering that one. As a public company CEO, I do not like short sellers and so I don't want to give them any, any ammo.
- [52:50]
Harry Stebbings
Do you not think any functioning efficient market has to have a short seller?
- [52:54]
Jason Wilk
I think the ways in which they derive their profits are not always above board and so maybe it, it helps drive an efficient market if there's the capability of shorting. But I think if you had a long only stock market it wouldn't look terribly different.
- [53:08]
Harry Stebbings
How do they derive profits badly?
- [53:10]
Jason Wilk
Well, you'll see some companies, they'll get these short reports that people put out where an analyst is out there, you know, similar to a sell side analyst. They're actually writing research on a company to get people to short it and oftentimes those facts are incorrect. Their assumptions, they can be blown out of proportion for things that again are just for purely for profit. That's it.
- [53:32]
Harry Stebbings
Is that legal? Isn't that like misinformation to change economic.
- [53:36]
Jason Wilk
Activity I believe is legal. I mean I think if as long as you're not saying a blatant lie about the business that could be deemed sort of defamation, which is hard to prove. You see big companies, I think most interesting was the one of Hindenburg being shut down. They've written short reports on places like Square Cash App and they decided to exit the business, which I thought was kind of interesting.
- [53:56]
Harry Stebbings
We just had Kovon as CEO on the show. Actually skirted that one. I was like, I'll leave that for another day. I wanted to build the friendship. It's not the most friendly start, is it? Like what did you think of Hindenburg?
- [54:05]
Jason Wilk
Yeah, yeah, it's not.
- [54:06]
Harry Stebbings
Anyway, final one, where is Dave in 10 years time you said you've got 12 million today.
- [54:12]
Jason Wilk
We've got 12 million today. I'm not committing to some sort of a user target but Dave is going to be much more prominent in your credit life than it is today. I think I alluded to this, but I really feel strongly that our our company is is very early on in its monetization journey today. Given we have a three year old checking account business, we have a 10 year old extra cash short term credit business and our ability to continue to grow those two parts of the business plus add in new capabilities on credit to add to those. Those opportunities I think are just massive, massive things for the company. So Dave in 10 years has multiple credit products. We are more of the primary bang for, for the vast majority of our consumers and it's just going to be a much bigger business because of the operation levers we talked a lot about today.
- [54:55]
Harry Stebbings
Jason, listen, I so appreciate you putting up with the direct questions. You've been fantastic. I'm such a fan of the incredible Jo. So thank you so much for joining me today.
- [55:05]
Jason Wilk
Thank you very much. Great to meet you.
- [55:08]
Harry Stebbings
I mean what an incredible discussion.
- [55:10]
Imran Khan
The story of Dave is the biggest.
- [55:11]
Harry Stebbings
Turnaround in the public markets I think of the last 24 months at least. I want to thank Jason for being so open in that discussion.
- [55:18]
Imran Khan
If you want to watch the show.
- [55:19]
Harry Stebbings
You can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.
- [55:22]
Imran Khan
But before we leave you today, turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion dollar startup requires countless hours of collection, collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Now at 20 VC, we've used Coda to bring structure to our content planning and episode prep, and it's made a huge difference. Instead of bouncing between different tools, we can keep everything from guest research to scheduling and notes all in one place, which saves us so much time. With Kodi, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, and the power of applications, all built for enterprise. And it's got the intelligence of AI, which makes it even more awesome. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility code Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to Coda iO20VC today and get six free months of the team plan for startups, that's Coda iO20VC. To get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. And while Coda keeps the engine running smoothly, Shopify puts the pedal to the metal when it's time to sell. I spent my time looking into sea successful businesses of today and tomorrow. And often there's a business that's behind the business, helping drive success for millions. That is Shopify. Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet, boosting conversions by up to an astonishing 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going into the business. Winner. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers customers are. Go to shopify.com 20vc to start your $1 per month trial today. That's shopify.com 20vc in letters. And while Shopify helps you make the sale, Gusto makes sure your team gets paid without the headache. Look, payday's awesome. But running payroll, calculating taxes and deductions, staying compliant? It's not easy. Unless of course, you have Gusto. Gusto is a a simple online payroll and benefits tool built for small businesses like yours. Gusto gets your team paid while automatically filing your payroll taxes. Zhi Yang, CEO of video game studio Serenity Forge, said Gusto was the first step in turning their basement project into a real company. It helped them scale globally, saving him 30 hours a month and letting him focus on building great games instead of doing boring admins. Plus you can offer benefits like 401k, health insurance and workers comp just for listening. Today you also get three months free. Go to gusto.com 20vc that's gusto.com 20vc.
- [58:19]
Harry Stebbings
As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Thursday. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin and me shooting the shit on the biggest news financings IPOs in technology. Always so much fun doing the three of us.