Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en getting the fancy car doesn’t make you happiest and you have to clean the car or getting a bigger comb out of the city doesn’t you know necessarily make you happy because then you commute farther to your work cool Alexa thanks for joining us on the podcast days we have special guests I’ll let you do your intro because I’m really in terrible at introductions but I you know I’ll admit we don’t we didn’t do a ton of sort of background research because I like to just talk in the moment and actually you know not have too much sort of prepared in my mind because then I’m always sort of referencing my notes and things like that but I’d I’d rather just kind of do it more organically but you were the CEO of learned that hey speak for yourself I know a bunch of I learned I’m just saying I personally prefer to do it this way Sam personally prepares I see he already knew about it you didn’t even do the research you just already knew so but for those who don’t know what was learned vest give us kind of like you’re maybe two or three minutes background so that people know who you are sure I think so I start from the beginning I grew up in Florida and when I always been an entrepreneur love entrepreneurs love building companies went to Harvard undergrad and studied happiness which I I was mentioning because I actually think somehow it’s been very helpful to life ended up I going back to business school there dropped out bottom of the worst recession and originally 81 years now I feel like this may be a our own koban moment is is becoming obviously something that’s worrisome but I built a financial planning software company called learn bass with a really simple mission which was so learn best became TurboTax for financial planning so literally every American family for an affordable price could get access to a financial plan and an advisor and on our fifth birthday on March 25th of 2015 sold the business to Northwestern Mutual for about three hundred and seventy five million dollars and then spent the next few years as part of that business at Northwestern Mutual and through it all that wrote some books that selling book I called financially fearless and then financially forward future of your wallet and I’m just a diehard entrepreneur I love entrepreneurs and I love to build businesses and so now I’m the managing partner I run a 200 million dollar venture fund called inspired capital which is headquarter in New York City and we pay it forward and we invest in students Series A entrepreneurs of tomorrow building big ideas so it’s really fun to get to have them both and now among the investing side and that’s me and I’m married I live in New York City I’ve three beautiful little babies if a girl dear old and a one-year-old which means I’m completely crazy but that’s who I am Wow impressive oh you’re not you’re not you’re not New York City right now I see are you I see greenery no I’m not I wish no so I have been in Florida I’m actually sitting in my like highschool bedroom which is which is bringing it all back full circle where we came we came down here for spring break and just haven’t come you have like a Justin Timberlake poster on the wall or something or what’s what’s in the high school room no no but you know it’s amazing look at this I literally I’m sitting unlike my yearbook which is just incredible and it’s I mean it’s so cute my mom has literally kept like all of the things and I’m some days I’m like mom why didn’t you serve some of this stuff away but she kept on my pictures you know my artwork and hold myself I’ll start because Sam’s probably still blown away he loves Harvard you had him at Harvard then you sold a company for three to 75 million bucks and then financial planning he’s a total financial planning their personal finance nerd so Sam do you need a moment to just sort of gather your thoughts are you ready to go no a little I I did not go to Harvard I wish but I do have an odd fascination with it I people say I have a Harvard sweatshirt people always say oh you went to Harvard as a kid I went there I paid money into Couture and I will just say I while Harvard was a great education I think there’s lots of things in life that are much cooler than Harvard did you say ID sorry graduated undergrad when I dropped out of Harvard Business okay gotcha and you said you studied happiness like what is that like one classic I took a class called getting rich and you know that wasn’t like my major it was just one class yeah so I actually I studied psychology I started in a track called mind brain behavior and then ended up in psychology and specifically there was a happiness lab that Dan Gilbert was running where we focused on like how people make decisions what makes us happy and basically the headline at the whole you know my whole experience was really bad about making decisions that make us happy we do things that we think will make us happy but in fact like getting the fancy car doesn’t make you happy cuz then you have to clean the car or getting a bigger home out of the city doesn’t have you know necessarily make you happy because then you commute farther to your work so it was just really really I think a good perspective of it’s the little things that really make us happy I love that you know this is very on topic so so I remember back in the day there’s a guy who was I think a professor at Harvard named Sean anchor is that somebody who was he was I he is one of my teacher Sean McClure um yeah he’s wonderful and actually um his core professor tall ben-shahar um and Philip stone were might might be situated he gave this TED talk that’s pretty great I still remember it and I’d watch this thing like 10 years ago that’s kind of you know some talks just stick with you and it was called that I think the happiness advantage or this sort of something like that and if I remember correctly the the thesis was being happy is actually an advantage to getting great results some people think about it the other way like if a great thing happens then I’ll be happy and his advice if I what I remember from 10 years ago was if I am happy I’ll have better results is that a good is that my accurate or am I just totally misremembering so the short term is that I’m in under extreme duress and extreme stress you can outperform in this short term if you’re actually very happy and relaxed and fulfilled you outperform the long call so when you’re building teams for long term success so you know inspired capital to venture funds we have a really unique group of people that have come together to build this firm and we’re trying to build a long-term fund and so I’m there focus on let’s make sure we have long-term happiness because you won’t perform in the long run and so and the other thing is I think one of the things I learned from Sean and tal my my professors is positive energy and attitude are actually an undervalued resource people are very naturally drawn to people that are positive if you’re super negative over and over people don’t want to be around you they don’t want to work with you they don’t want to show up for you and so I think again you know one thing people always ask me is what would I tell high schoolers and I’m like have a good attitude it goes really far and it’s if part of that point of happiness is an advantage so is positivity I always talk about this enthusiasm is sort of incomplete undersupply amongst successful people so you know when you’re trying to compete and you’re trying to be successful one person I’m like the stupidest obviously you’ve bought in on this what I’m saying is that for most people or most environments I’ve been around whether it’s like you know entrepreneurs investors right now I’m at a bigger company because my company got acquired it’s like the execs at this company in some ways enthusiasm I think people see it as like a low status thing to do it’s like oh you know sort of being reserved is somehow more I don’t know prestigious or powerful in some way and I’ve gone the complete opposite direction where I’m overly enthusiastic and I’m like dude I have 1/10 of the skills of all the people that have been around me but I’ve been able to go so far because I think enthusiasm is such a superpower that most people could tap into and totally don’t for whatever reason I I mean I totally agree with you and beyond not only do I totally agree with you I also think it’s worth saying that it is a skill that we can all adopt right like just trying to have a positive outlook it’s something you know I can’t grow taller or I can’t get better at you know a certain trait that I just don’t have trying to be positive and trying to be joyful I think actually it’s something we can all put on it may not be easy for everybody to do it but it is possible Sam are you an enthusiastic guy people like this podcast so we have a very loyal audience and I think it’s because people feel as though the Shawn and I have a little bit of a contagious energy and yeah it is it is positivity or it’s very positive but I I think some of my co-workers will say that I’m kind of grumpy because I’ve got to be the bad guy unfortunately a lot of times a time I think you have like an angry enthusiasm you flip your switch flips from like in extreme enthusiasm and it’s super infectious to like quickly very angry or grumpy about something and then you switch back sort of effortlessly but for the people around you they’re probably just getting rocked by it yeah I like maybe you were like this but like I will fight with my like executives at my company but then I think we can just hug it we’re good we’re good I definitely like that um can we talk about LearnVest a little bit so I used to I use you guys when you first came out and I mean I was just I didn’t have a lot of money to where that was like an issue but I was just starting to use it what uh what was the premise behind the business because I think it it kind of pivoted affair once or twice right um we started it was that business plan was always the same it was content tools and advice and I started the out of my own savings so we started with content because back in 2008 in New York City I actually founded the company in 2007 and you can do a free newsletter and just kind of get going and so we started creating a brand we started trying to talk to our users and just have a really authentic voice to say you know for me it was pretty it was pretty stupefying that I could graduate from a great school you know I worked on Wall Street I was really good at math really good as economics but when it came to just the basic questions of my wallet how many credit cards should I have what’s a credit score exactly and how do I make sure I keep it safe what are the activities I need to do and to make sure my wallet is strong how do I you know how much can I afford and rent really basic questions the fact that very clear answers was kind of wild so we started with content and then we always said it would be content tools and advice and so once we finally raised enough money to build protecting we started with a budgeting app I which was a place for you to see all your finances in one place and then what we quickly realized was people wanted advice and I had no idea what advice look like check would it look like phone calls call center open 24 hours a day I had no idea and we just said we’ll follow the customers and we originally started on when you build content you want to focus on an audience a specific language so we started with female Millennials and then what we quickly by the time we got to advise we just served households so it was never a pivot it was very much just like an extension of what we were doing and by the time we get to advice we actually built financial planning software that could take any family and ingest 60 data points about them and then would spit out exactly what we call GPS for your money so literally a living and breathing financial plan and we connect you to I’m a certified financial planner and we connect people to trusted advisors that worked full time for us and so that’s what we did and it was a subscription service and then by the end we had company is buying learn best software for all of their employees as a benefit it you you know akin to your health benefits and your 401k benefits and so that’s what learned us became we became the the the largest fastest-growing online financial planning company you how long did it take to go from cotton so I don’t know if you know about my business we’re hosting this pocket it’s called the hustle it’s content as well and we’re also building to us how long did you go so I I’m very familiar with the content game and this strategy I think it’s great but most people fail at it I think it’s quite hard how long did it take to go from content to creating your project products um so we started content in I May of 2007 is when I founded the company my then-boyfriend right now he’s my husband his dad was our lawyer so shout out to him he was the best and my mom is a secretary literally like like signed the formal paperwork I will never forget it and then I drew the 75 page business plan and then by the time that I dropped out of HBS it was December 18th of 2008 moved to New York and started I remember I gave myself Christmas I said you get basically a week and then it’s go time and I so started building January 1st of 2009 and then by the time we launched the company like truly launched our first 10,000 users was the following January we launched we launched this thing called boot camp which for ten day programs that people could go through to learn about the wallet and they were free and we quickly one day realize holy smokes 10,000 people have signed up and week to go through one of these programs and from there we just kept building and we kept talking to our customers and saying what kind of tools do you want what do you want advice to look like and one day I people would write in and say really want to talk to a customer or sorry to I really want to talk to somebody I have questions I had questions and so we then keep mine as a regulated business to become a financial advisor and so we had to go get regulated and became a registered investment advisor and we then opened it up that you could pay to talk to an adviser and we said let’s make it super honest really transparent no hidden costs just on the site exactly what it cost and well like you step back it seems really logical like what we were doing was never illogical but it actually flipped the whole industry on its head the industry used to pretend to give advice wait for free but then charge you deeply on all the products that they would give you and all those fees but actually be pretty material so if you had a hundred thousand dollars we were paying two thousand dollars a year for advice and that didn’t always feel good people were very distrustful and so we just said flip it over make it five hundred dollars for the year to get access to unlimited advice and we’ll sell no products so we always can trust that our advice is the right advice and so that’s what LearnVest did and again it seemed at the time it was actually pretty groundbreaking to build financial planning software for everybody and for the masses and so we also said we’ll take you a few thirty thousand dollars in income or thirty million um again not that wild right it’s just let’s beat let’s be a good business that takes care of people but what we realize is that alone brand positioning is pretty how many employees did you have like in the first two years or so to Bill about that uh so we were small in the beginning you know we got to about fifty employees but I call it the first real like two to three years up interaction that’s all you’re hiring a lot of people that’s a 50 0 50 is good and by the time we got acquired we’re about 150 people which you know we were real business and so that for me I meant just like so much personal growth so much you know being a young entrepreneur you don’t know what you don’t know and so it seemed really big to me at times um but yeah you started launching those the products in the advice so how cuz you’re what I’ll call an audience first company which is first build it through content loyalty and then when you have a service to offer or a product or tool to offer you’ve got your customer sitting there you just need to convert X percent of them so how big was the audience um well I I mean I can’t tell you like it’s all from memory by the time we get acquired we’re about 2 and 1/2 million users so by the time that we when I your video disappeared we can get me there your back so there is ok perfect there we go I don’t know what happened by the time that we got acquired we were about two and a half million what’s the user uh I was somebody who had signed up for to make an account so they sign yes no is I mean and we so it’s funny we were really old school we actually didn’t we didn’t ever spend on advertising we I think by the the year we got acquired we hadn’t even spent a million dollars on advertising um it was really old school we were very focused on like let’s let’s go and find customers through business partnerships and relationships and creating content and you know we wrote books and we did all these other things to really build a following um and then we kept converting them into that so you know for that for the tools where people would link all their finances and we would see their for wallets we had about half a million of those and then on the paying customer side when we got acquired we had about depending on how you cut it made about a hundred thousand words on the page - I mean Facebook was like it wasn’t the same it was different yes I mean so um Mark Zuckerberg I went to college undergrad with me I was hissing classmate and so Facebook definitely existed before I was starting wearing best but I you know 2007-2008 when I was starting the idea Facebook I think was founded in like 2004 so he did but it was very much you know you weren’t building your business on Facebook you were at Harvard when he launched Facebook at Harvard yeah so - you remember when you heard about Facebook uh do we remember are you kidding you like could never have forgotten um yeah I remember at actually at the end of your username what would be the number of Facebook user you were and I was like in the hundreds so I was like roughly around 150 uh and you’ve knew it because it was just the most helpful thing on the planet it’s like oh what’s that person’s name again I can look them up um and I always joked with my husband when my husband asked me out I like couldn’t look up who he was yet he’d asked me out before Facebook existed and I remember being like how I can’t remember who he is like is it this guy or that guy and it just like my kids will never know a world where you like can’t look somebody up I mean it’s gonna be a big deal or were you like this is useful for Harvard and yeah I mean like could you foresee that it was gonna be like a seventy-five billion dollar company um you know I can’t take credit for having like something that was that kind of crystal ball ish but you knew it was a big deal um really quickly you could just tell it was like the amount of time you were spending on it how quickly was spreading at when it went to other colleges and you could look up you’re at those schools when you could poke people and it was you know to the credit of market was an incredibly infectious blog did you know him personally I know so I did know man we are an undergrad I met him a handful of times and I know his family and his siblings pretty well but no we need to start by joining when it was it’s like hey this thing is kind of taking off I’m extra now Harvard you were thinking about drop you know you dropped out of business school anyways to start a business I actually was thinking at that time of dropping out of Harvard to start learn that’s basically so my mom convinced me to graduate I said to her I want to go start a company I know I need to my mom was like can you just graduate pretty please I’ve gotten into Harvard Business School my mom was like huge at least graduate from from college and took my mom’s credit I did I’m glad I did but I that that itch to go start something was like pretty alive and I you know to the credit of like a Mark Zuckerberg when you are so close to seeing businesses get built you know I think they called it the Facebook effect which is when you can see how powerful the Internet can be and if you’re a you a hardworking person who has skills you’re like huh maybe I should go do something and but I so guess and I will definitely say I think Facebook’s spawned an entire you know an acquired when you guys had I forgot how many but I’ve read a blog post which was like hey learn fist gets acquired for whatever hundreds of millions of dollars and it seemed to me when I was doing my kind of back at the envelope math I was like so they were doing sort of like as my math showed me you guys are doing like less than ten million in revenue and got acquired for you said three hundred seven five million that’s a huge multiple so first a might look at I just did I lose a zero somewhere and then secondly why did you get such a big outcome that’s what I wanted yeah no yeah no so we’re definitely doing a lot more in revenue than that but um you know I think what we developed was a pretty powerful software so we had about eight patents on our software we built cash flow based financial planning software which didn’t exist which is really silly if you think about it most of the financial planning software out there was focused on helping you know people who were quite wealthy think about how to build more wealth but it didn’t have to ever net can you pay your bills but for ninety five percent of the country you know now 78% of the country was paycheck to paycheck so actually that software that existed would never have worked for the majority of the entire country and so we built cash flow based financial planning software which actually would say how much cash do you have and can you pay your bills and if you have something left then where do we go put it and so it was a pretty profound technology platform and in fact I even chatted with somebody else the other day who’s trying to build like a similar company you learn best because there’s still demand for these software platforms abide these big financial institutions and they’re really hard and they’re very tedious to build so so no and then North thrush mutual also is just an incredible business and they have you know five million plus families across the country that they serve and for them to be able to take our software and go deliver you know plans to everybody was a very powerful concept that the CEO had so so yeah so that was the first bit and then the second that’s good to know what was the sort of differentiator that’s really powerful that could drive material outcomes I know I want to come back to you were saying that you’re talking to people who are building similar tools I want to come back to that in a second but I have two questions for you were you profitable when you guys sold uh we weren’t like within profitability meaning like we depending on how we’re spending we were near profitable and we could have been profitable one thing that’s worth saying we we were incredibly lean and how we had run we had just raised thirty five million dollars so my mandate was to continue growing and bills out business units at that time but again I’m a recession entrepreneur in my DNA we always lived as though we didn’t have extra money and it was just I you know I think we went through a moment at post 2010 where was all about growth and get as big as you can with no mindsets profitability my roots first of all are like I’m naturally you know very very frugal very scrappy every dollar every dollar we started spending with my own in the early days its heist at the company up and so that was and I read a few different founders saying that that’s the best way to be a founder and I I lived it because I felt like it was the right way to run the business and so even when we were spending like there were no dollars that were not going somewhere I’m gonna get this number this number will be roughly right but we had something like forty five million dollars of cash when we got acquired on the balance sheet and meaning that we just we were never spending that so why are me why raise you so much if you just raised thirty million dollars you had forty five million dollars in the bank that means you had something like ten or fifteen million dollars when you raised your last round and if you’re making good revenue why raised in the first place and also why sell so great question and so I think first of all we’d so we’d literally just raised when we got acquired and North Oxford which will actually had had just invested and then they came and said actually we’d like to we’d like to acquire you guys so so that’s that and then why set so what we were building I to be able to go get it to you know our direct consumer business was growing but I remember every day we were you know signing up forty families a day forty households a day to get financial plans or you know some days we do two hundred but it was and I remember thinking we built this incredibly valuable asset and we built it because we really believe that it should be something that should go as quickly as we can’t cross the country but getting people to financially plan is really hard it’s not like anybody walks down the street and says oh I can’t wait to go get a financial plan today that concept didn’t exist and I always joked I actually was selling an entrepreneur today I was like god I really did run a hard business to build which in retrospect I think need it and like an even scrap your entrepreneur than I thought if that makes sense like if I was selling shoes online like holy smokes how much fun would that be and I feel like that’s an easy business to build but I was selling something that was hard right and we were productizing a financial plan that nobody ever was super excited about and there was some part of the population that loved it you know we were we were telling people hey financial plans gonna make you better and then once they tasted it they loved it so our customers were super sticky but I remember thinking to myself oh my goodness Northwestern Mutual’s 8,000 financial advisors that passionately care about the mission and the same way I do that can actually go and use this platform to get to more families faster and if I really believe in their mission that’s probably the right thing to do actually for the business is if you could tell me that I could go from hundred thousand to five million in a short period of time and like guarantee that that would happen like that actually is a better use of what does make sense so did the company Northwestern Mutual did they acquire you based off of was the the frame or the valuation based off of how many customers you currently had or did they just say that’s a we don’t really you know behemoth of a company we don’t really care about your users but what we want to do is just take what you built and plug it in on our back-end and yeah I mean I think and again I can’t speak for how they valued the company exactly it wasn’t part of those conversations on the back end but I think that what they viewed it as was they’ll say that there were three really powerful things the first was an incredible software that they could plug in that could go to their customers the second was our entire platform and if you go in Northwestern Mutual comm you know today I was effectively learned best we just moved over the tech stack made it so you could log in and see your finances use a lot of the tools we launched their mobile apps everything leveraging all of that and then the final thing was the team and I think one of the things I was most proud of is by the time that I was i you know i joined the management team but it’s toted at one point roughly a third of the management team of Northwestern Mutual was the learn best original team and Northwest mutual is a incredible company if you remember you know they do call it 35 to 40 billion in revenue they’d be a fortune 50 company the little tiny startup and by the way you know I forget how many assets app but it’s like half a trillion of assets like they are massive they’re blue-chip they are solidus can be been here for a hundred and sixty three years but for a little tiny startup if they acquire to come in and be such a big part of the future of the company really shows you like a talent the innovation the thinking and then they got a whole campus in New York City and they still have today which became a bit of their digital headquarters i and again it was 150 people and we’ve got acquired but at some point it became close to five six hundred people that they were envisioning growing it to to be there yeah because it just raised I mean if you said yourself it sounds like you had a it was a slog a little bit if I’m kind of reading between lines like you’re like oh my god it’s 40 users a day like this is really freaking hard wit and they offer you that we’re like yup and or what was that like no it wasn’t that simple and made a handful of other acquires at the table I and I actually took my job very seriously which was my your job as CEO in those moments if you take your job seriously and maybe this is just how I’m wired my job is actually to go get all of the opportunities and unemotionally bring them to the board and to say here all the different paths that we can take forward and then the board came together and made a decision of what we thought was best for us and I actually waited until that day which was the morning that we signed to make my decision because my job was gathering all the different opportunities to bring them to the board and say here’s what we have in front of us we can do this path this path or this path I mean to be crystal clear it was never like a stressful decision in that staying private so it was a really good decision like we had as I said about 50 million dollars of cash actually they goes 52 million I remember correctly of cash on the balance sheet we were growing it was starting to get easier and easier because we’d launched learned best Network which was growing rapidly and we were selling the software subscription in tens of thousands that’s way more fun than you know a hundred a day um way more fun you’re like great I can do this and that business was really taking off and it was I just started to see the oxygen of it um I think the present I’m making is every minute to getting there was a lot of work it was never one of these businesses that just like overnight 7,000 people show up to Chipotle and can’t wait to eat our salads like it was it was tough anything like that but so I didn’t make the decision till that morning and it was really I took it so seriously because I had as I said about 150 employees I had you know hundreds of plus shareholders if people had been part of the company at some point left and then all of our investors and so I had to think on behalf of hundreds of people and I felt that your CEO job is actually a really serious one which is to bring it to the table and then make the best decision on everyone’s behalf knowing that some people be thrilled about neck juez ish and some people big why are you selling this is such a good business it’s going well and I just also knew it what do you what do you regret about that journey I mean are you how would you take back selling or are you happy with that would you take back racing all that money are you happy with that is there anything that you you’re like really well I don’t regret a single thing I have to say I’m the CEO Jang shil ski at Northwestern Mutual was one of the best leaders that I ever have had the chance to work next to he is visionary and honestly like what he did I think I’m blown away by as as big companies think about you know I ingesting innovation he was really and I think and how he did a um and I think there’s a another guy named Christian Mitchell who’s the head of strategy and he was instrumental I actually it really was his idea the acquisition he became a best friend and somebody I admire and you know to take a fast-moving go fast break stuff start up in New York City with 150 people who are forward leaning in every way and then taking a company that literally is about as blue chip as you can get the the 163 years I you know they will live through every major challenge that we could go through as a society and to put us together it was kind of a brilliant marriage and we always said what what cemented us was our values if we believe every American family should have a financial plan it was a very simple marriage but it was like it was the Odd Couple I actually think some story one day wrote like The Odd Couple came together um and we felt like we maybe we made each other better and I think you know personally I got to grow a lot through it most times when a start-up CEO gets acquired they like sneak out the back door as quickly as they can and I care deeply that by the end of it um that I I wanted to make sure they felt great and I wanted to feel like I had done what I said I was gonna do and so I end up saying for years because I had such a good time and I think that that that speaks volumes to Northwestern Mutual which again I was chatting with a few friends who sold their business in the last week and they were like how did you stay four years and I’m like I loved it and that doesn’t mean there weren’t hard days there were brutal days there were really hard days uh you know we got down to learned best brand at one point because it really made more sense for it to live on the parent company as a parent I’d been around for 163 years and learned best was a tiny little brand and you know I was proud of that decision also because it was the right one for what we promised we’re crazy interesting I know Shawn’s good thinking of something I was just going to say if you can be this enthusiastic about Northwestern Mutual you sure do have the enthusiasm skill mastered so I commend you for that so what do you what are you looking at now so you invest now you got a fund inspired capital what spaces are interesting to you nowadays and so so inspired Capital we’re an early-stage funds so seed series a we’re totally generalist we’re literally looking right now at everything from restaurant tax so food tech which is really interesting it’s a mix of FinTech and sourcing of any type of food that we lolly from straight to agriculture you know farms to your coffee shops that were pretty excited about we’re really focused on the future of money movement and there’s some really cool things we’re working on there and we are we just messing the company and the trucking logistics space which we think in hope can put lots of people to work um and so you know really focusing on what is the next decade gonna look like we actually published today a future of works study um and I heard this great quote we basically started the year in 2020 and we’re ending this year 2030 just in how much we have just advanced the ball on who how and who we all are and how we will think and you know being a working mom how amazing it is is it that I can actually excel at my job truly excel and actually see my kids probably an hour and a half to 2 per day more I mean it’s yeah it’s I will say I think we’re living through one of the biggest seismic shifts on our planet right now ever may be the probably biggest in my lifetime the global health world is collaborating in ways that you’ve never seen because we are all focused on the common enemy of kovat and I just think the world is incredibly exciting and I will say when you see asymmetric dislocation like we see right now because the world is on its tilt that’s when innovators go nuts and this is like my favorite thing I’d talk to ten entrepreneurs a day and as you can tell I’m honestly just a junkie four founders I love building businesses my brain loves nothing more than hard problem-solving and I was just saying to a founder before this you know companies have season right you have spring summer fall in winter winter stocks right and as I just said I had plenty of winters that LearnVest summers when it’s fun and things are exciting and I like to say that you know the inspired capital team we are our best when it’s winter and for a lot of businesses right now this is a winter it’s a scary time I was just gonna ask you you talked about future of work and you think there’s a huge shift going on I think a lot of people right now are talking about this remote work what is what does that mean is this sort of permanent is this temporary what are the second secondary effects I’m curious what’s something you know it’s the Peter Taylor question what’s something that you believe about the future work Denton is not sort of consensus right now it’s not something that everybody is saying do you have any sort of original views or contrarian views around the future of work um I mean I’ll just say a few things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately um I don’t know that we I I don’t we will go back to offices so let’s be clear um but I think a lot of the fat will be cut and what I mean by that is we use I don’t know about you guys but I used to like be in cabs and running and ubers and subways and sprinting and planes and trains and like the frenzy of what I used to do because there are so many social norms like if I’m gonna see you in the city I wouldn’t be like hey let me zoom you right you’d like that’s rude come visit me why like they’re so just I think the amount of what I’m gonna call it useless friction that we used to apply to our lives that now looks calmer so that’s great I think you know I’m really bullish on just equalizing households I actually think that this is this is a great equalizer um everybody’s partaking in so many parts of running a household these days because we were blocked in our homes and that’s gonna create some permanent habits but I think our gonna be better and um you know I I am really fortunate to have a phenomenal partner and my husband and we really do both a lot of everything I around our home and I think that that’s gonna be hopefully more normalized going forward as I think a lot of parents are gonna realize it’s not a choice stay home or work like there’s this very powerful middle path and so you know I think the Greek economy going into this intermittent work economy it’s just exploding right now like you can work 20 hours a week if you want to you can work 70 hours a week if you want to and I think that we’re gonna so the only thing out I’ll say that’s I’m not contented I am deeply worried about how 40 million Americans are gonna get back to work and I think you know the markets right now Main Street and Wall Street are completely disconnected I honestly wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning wondering how are 15 million households gonna be absorbed when those jobs don’t come back and and I’m worried about that a lot so that’s one thing I’ll say I don’t I sometimes wonder why more people aren’t talking about what we’re gonna do with the jobs that do not come back and are you that for is me whatever what’s your background you’re what part of Florida you from I try grew up in Jacksonville Florida I was born in Kentucky I grew up in Jacksonville Florida my mom’s side of the family’s from South Bend Indiana my grandfather was a welder who I once whole life my grandmother I’ve worked at AT&T is like a operator I’m doing the spinning motion she was literally operator and then my dad’s side of the family I want oval eyes Belgian and so and then both my parents were in the Army as doctors and nurses and so my brother was born in Germany and I was born in Kentucky what you sound so you I’m from Missouri and then I lived in Tennessee so I’m from a normal family not a Silicon Valley not a Manhattan family I live in San Francisco now and I’m deeply I’m definitely on like the inside of like a lot of the you know the San Francisco nerds and it sounds like you are on the inside of the Manhattan relatively elite circle I mean the partner for your for your firm is like a pretty big deal that fits their family so you do you just feel ever like you’re an outsider of I mean are you do you just feel a little bit more connected to like your roots and you said Main Street in Wall Street does it feel more like you’re connected to your roots where you grew up or do you identify more at this I mean and I say this because I’m in this crew to a little bit like this we’re pretty elite right like we’re like in this like relatively tight circle I mean where are you or do you think yeah I’m so glad you asked this question I so glad for a bunch of reasons and I think what’s really obvious to me is I think it is an incredible competitive advantage um we I think right now we are in a world where the country is very disconnected I’m actually hoping that cope it is something that like does unify us a bit more those days where I worry in the wrong directions there’s days where I feel hopeful and I think the fact that I came from a really again like my dad was in the army as a doctor my mom went to boot camp was a nurse my mom is a nurse practitioner my dad passed away when I was younger so my I was actually raised by a single mom with three older sorry three kids I’ve told her brothers um who are also both doctors um but like it reminds me every day that the bubble that we live in is completely ridiculous and in fact you know I am a certified financial planner who stared at America’s wallets for a decade and the headline is people can’t afford anything and everyone’s stressed and if you don’t have dignity to be able to put food on a table for your family that’s what that’s a pretty stressful thing if you’re not sure how you’re gonna forget like leaving for retirement if you don’t know how you can actually think all right now holy smokes and now that I become a parent like that’s so much more visceral and I actually think it’s a real competitive advantage to remember that I there’s 300 plus million households and this is in this country and that not everybody is on the same page and technology is and always moving everybody forward and so I think it’s a major advantage to not forget that and again I’m literally in Jacksonville Florida right now in front of me dressed in like my childhood bedroom and I’m so proud of my roots and I’m so proud of my family and what they’ve helped me accomplish and goodness gracious do I feel like we need to do more so it’s a good segue because earlier you said that people are actually still trying to solve the problem that you were trying to solve for what opportunities exist in this financial planning personal finance base I’m a huge nerd in this I used wealthfront I used personal capital I’ve used mint I use spreadsheets I love this stuff well first I love you for caring so I know thank you I mean it means so much to me you have no idea and I still honestly have days where that like makes me so proud you know I think a few things at the problem of our wallets for America is bigger than just like great software there’s a lot of what I’m going to call infrastructure problems that like tech can’t solve what’s the minimum wage how do we handle you know working mothers when 25 percent of the country’s moms are single moms and how do we handle daycare blah blah there’s a lot of other big problems around the wallet in America that like a cool technology app doesn’t solve that said I don’t feel like learn best solved everything and in fact I I have this itch that we wanted to scratch for a long time and around you know I was a part of the population where I wanted to talk to a financial planner that Herning there’s a certain user type about 22% of the country from our data that wanted to talk to an adviser in the country but about 78% of the country doesn’t want talk to anybody they just want the problems of their wallet to be solved for them and so I get really excited about the future of self-driving wallets because I actually think every hour that you have an extra dollar penny 100 16,000 of credit card that based on how you cut it the average savings account is 400 bucks but if every hour you got paid and then you could pay your bills and live your life but it would actually scream into your 401k and get the matching dollar that same hour and then auto invest think about that like that is what is the difference between and I always I feel like COBIT exposed the precariousness of our economy but it also exposed the precariousness of the American wallet and I think that we’re going to be in a groundbreaking moment of how do we go fix it so any entrepreneurial is thing I want to talk to you Alexa at inspired capital I want to hear your ideas but these are the big that’s it that’s a crazy idea and I think that’s a that’s a cool idea for someone who wants to like it’s it’s kind of like a go big or go home that’s a pretty cool idea I like that what would prevent that from working what are the barriers ACH it’s the infrastructure layer that I was just saying that I mean is it money movement or is it a cultural thing because I’m a business owner I like I like the two weeks buffer for a small business when you’re just getting started like businesses are we take advantage of that right like you’re like like oh great I’ve got like five days I got to go collect this this clients money and then I can make payroll yeah um it no I that I think is probable I mean you have to bleeding-edge companies you know I think in just the last week we saw a few companies say I’m work from home forever but you take a few more that then say we’re gonna pair our employees daily and in fact uber started playing its drivers every ride that’s that’s an example of you’ve worked you should get paid why do why do we withhold from you it’s a free loan to your employer and at some point that will break down but that’s not the thing I think is harder it’s actually the money movement piece of because our wallets have been unbundled we used to have wallets at one place let’s say chase and used to have your credit card they’re your savings account they’re your checking account your 401k cetera you now just both of you have names while you’ve been on this call seven places that you have financial accounts so it’s money movement across those accounts moves across ACA trail that ACA trail takes about five days or it mimics it and it’ll look like same day and sometimes that same day is really more of like a magic trick it’s not really there so then to be able to pay it out to some other place is very hard so it’s the rails and money movement that European companies doing something similar helping what was it called transfer uh there’s a company called transfer eyes but then actually Europe is miles ahead of us they’re on real time payments rails and you can actually they like let there they’re like a full decade ahead of us and you don’t even need them no monetary api basically a mandatory payments infrastructure right if your notice called UPI or how much know about brainstorm ideas we just shoot the [ __ ] and we brain some ideas where we see something interesting and we say hey this is cool these guys are doing streaming money what would you do with that hey why do we get I think we literally had this conversation which was why do you get paid after two weeks that’s crazy it’s a free loan to your employer and so that’s what we do on this podcast twice a week so that’s yeah we like to nerd out about this stuff so it’s like we know we know a medium a little bit yeah what uh one of my favorite ways to brainstorm is I like to look at companies in other countries and just be like do that in America so like Gilt Groupe Kevin Ryan was like oh I see this French companies doing this let’s just do that in America and we’ll put a little spin on it what’s a European company or an Indian company that is doing this quite well that I can go and learn about in order to see like how this is done because this is this like pretty hard to conceptualize right because we’re like it’s been done this way for who knows decades hundreds of years yet I mean to be honest for the standard of what I want to see built I don’t believe that there’s a company that is closed there’s a couple united states that’s starting to think about this and in doing a good job also called tally where the jason the founder is wonderful and it you know he he was helping people he started with credit card debt pay off the credit card debt faster which was that Court mean and starting automation around it but um you know I think I want to I want to like fast forward the decade ahead where we actually get to Instant Streaming money it you know I call it liquefied money you’re calling it streaming money where your money can always be optimizing to the right place and that gets pretty powerful when that begins to happen but most importantly not only is it powerful it meaningfully changes the life of American families across meaningfully so I’ve heard this idea before about basically hey what’s the category of what you built it’s like pee pee pee FM or something like that yeah pfm personal finance manager and the theory is basically you have things that clarity money and LearnVest and others that were basically all like hey we can suggest some things we can show you some charts and analysis but like fundamentally you the user make the decision and what you’re talking about is the software makes the decision right self-driving basically like it’s not it’s not you’re sitting in your car and your car suggests to you how you should you know turn or change lanes the car changes lanes because it knows where you’re trying to get as your destination and so I’ve heard before that hey what we need is for to get that get AI basically to the point where it can actually make the decisions and optimize the money for you so that the user doesn’t have to make decisions user says I want I have these financial goals for myself this is my income coming in here’s my bills and it basically does it and what I’ve what you added on was the reason that can’t happen right now is because the transfer is too slow but it seems like there’s a middle step which is just right now the software doesn’t decide the user decides and most users don’t want to think about that or make those decisions that most people are not active with their money management much to your chagrin I’m sure so is it more about software deciding versus users deciding or is it more about liquefied money um so liquefied money matters but then to your point so I’m gonna like I want to answer that with as with a visual question when we imagine money right now we imagine money by saying okay I’m gonna log into my you know my you trade a town and I’m gonna stare it on my grass and and you know look at things and I’m gonna talk to an advisor and tell them my goals and then like a lot of things are gonna be executed I almost think that we are thinking about the limits and the sound of what technology offers today as opposed to what the customer really wants if you ask a customer what they really want they want enough money to do what they need to do and they want everything else to be taken care of and like for most people thinking about money all day long is two words fun or exciting and in fact it’s quite stressful I’m so imagined and so I almost think we visualize money based on what exists but imagine I thought exercise and I’ll use an Amazon Alexa since I literally there’s like 17 in my brother’s house and he just likes to yell at me all day anything’s it’s so funny but basically let’s use an Amazon Alexa and imagine you could walk in your kitchen every morning and just say you have surveillance so you have rules that you’ve set it around your wallet so has anyone who’s broken my identity has anyone done anything bad or on tour restrictions that you put on to like my kids credit cards can youth only you know spend 400 my savings account for checking for you know if i need cash we’re gonna obviously go away from cash permanently at some point um and then everything else just optimize for me and that’s math the thing I love you know I am a math geek I’ve always liked math growing up I always loved it math is really beautiful because this isn’t you know we’re not trying to cure something a disease that we don’t this isn’t a Kovan situation where we don’t know that we don’t know what to do yet we are looking for a vaccine to use that as an analogy this is math for every American wallet I can mathematically tell you where their next dollar should go to save to save them money make their life better and outside of them telling us what their goals are then the math can do it and it can do it every hour or every minute and at some point when you get there that is for the American wallet and so that’s the vision of that’s literally the picture in the back of my head is like when do we get to a place where my money is just doing what it should do at all times and right now there’s wild amounts of friction move it from here put it in the savings account sweep it into this do this with this pay off the credit card to pay off your student loans you have to make two payments and tell them please pay the principal not just the interest friction everywhere and at some point it will go away and I motto services began and it would be selling my life starts you’re very uh persuasive I feel like I’m ready to like get behind you and say let’s go to war you’re very you’ve got a very good pitch I would set these teachings at his book his book I can teach you at he’s a great guy and I will say like every financial planner out there that’s doing the work to help help people I just how I feel I’m not poor anymore but I will remember be poor and like so afraid to look at my login to my bank account and then I eventually created all these systems so it’s like a little bit of paycheck goes here a little bit of interest this thing goes there though there and I’m like I I like jerry-rigged this thing together and even to this day I’m still like I hate logging into my bank account just because I’m from a year it’s like PTSD right you’re like it’s so like I just don’t even animate some stuff because I’m like I don’t even want to I hate it I don’t like yeah this is a perfect example of where you know I really do think yeah I grew up a really normal life I grew up in Jacksonville Florida which is a wonderful place to grow up and I just think you know I’m interested in technologies that can impact tens of millions of families I and like really meaningfully make our life better and one last thing you know inspired Capital we literally invest across all sectors I just told you everything from trucking logistics to consumer software to FinTech but one thing I particularly like about in tech is in fin tech any innovation is actually helping the customer right like you’re not innovating in fin tech in a way that like gouges the customer it’s like there constantly making their life better and cheaper and less expensive and the pressure it puts on the big incumbents to drive their prices down is really powerful and I think that’s pretty awesome so I think it’s a great place you already gave your email address I wish people find you who should find you how do how do people connect with you I would say I’m also on Instagram I’m just Alexa von Tobel our fund is inspired capital but you can message me on Instagram and I at the one place I actively try to respond to as many that come through so Alexa von Tobel on Instagram and thank you guys for having me this is so fun you guys are so memorable and again really honored to host out [Music]