20VC: Plaid and Column Co-Founder, William Hockey on Why the Brands that Win in Fintech Will Not Be Financial Services Brands, What US Banking Can Learn from China & Why Companies Can Be Built Slower than People Think?

Will Hockey is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO @ Column, the only nationally chartered bank built to enable developers and builders to create new financial products. Before co-founding Column, Will was the Co-Founder, President, and CTO @ Plaid, a world-leading data network and payments platform. In 2020, Visa attempted to acquire Plaid for $5.3BN, however, this was blocked due to regulatory issues and the company went on to raise at a reported $13.4BN valuation just 9 months later. Additionally, Will is on the board of Scale.ai. In Today's Episode with Will Hockey We Discuss: 1.) The Founding of $13.4BN Plaid: How did Will make his way into the world of startups and come to found Plaid with Zach? If we are all a function of our histories, what is Will running from? What is he running toward? What does Will know now that he wishes he had known when he started Plaid? 2.) Will Hockey: The Makings of a Decacorn Founder: What does the term "high performance" mean to Will? How has this changed over time? Having had such a successful time building Plaid to $13.4BN, how does Will assess his own relationship to risk and his relationship to money? How does Will approach his own personal portfolio planning? Equity, debt, real-estate? How does Will optimize his own personal wealth? Column is his second time founding a company, what did Will decide to take from Plaid that worked well? What did he decide he would not do having seen it work badly at Plaid? 3.) The Building of Truly Great Teams: Why does Will believe that companies can be built so much slower than people think? How does Will determine the decisions that have to be made fast vs those with time? How does Will ensure the same size of urgency and speed within his team without this time or funding pressure? What have been Will's single biggest lessons when it comes to people acquisition and retention? 4.) Fintech: The Next 10 Years: How will the next 10 years look different from the last in fintech? What changes will be better? What will be worse? What is Will worried about? What is he excited about? What does Will mean when he says, "the US financial system can function like a protocol"? What does Will believe are some of the core myths of the US financial system? Why does Will believe the current financial system can and will fix a lot of what crypto is trying to solve? What barriers will prevent this from happening? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: Will's Favourite Book: The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World's Food Supply

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am so excited for this guest on the show today. I've wanted to have him on the show for a long time. It took a while to convince him. I think he's one of the sharpest and most insightful founders in our industry. He's been a friend for a long time also, since investing in 20VC Fund One. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome William Hockey, co-founder and co-CEO of Column, the only nationally chartered bank built to enable developers and builders to create new financial products. Before co-founding Column, Will was the co-founder, president and CTO at Plaid, a world-leading data network and payments platform. In 2020, Visa attempted to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion, reportedly. However, this was blocked due to regulatory issues, and the company went on to raise at a reported $13.4 billion valuation just nine months later.

• 0:46Harry Stebbings?

  On top of all this, Will was also on the board of Scale.ai. This is an incredible discussion, and I want to say a huge thank you to Will for taking the time to join me.

• 0:55Harry Stebbings?

  But before we move into the episode today, Harvard Management Company is constantly seeking out the next generation of great investors and entrepreneurs. HMC has managed Harvard University's endowment for nearly 50 years and was one of the first institutional investors in venture capital. Their experience and long-term investment horizon make some ideal partners to get world-changing ideas on a path to viability and success. They work as a true partner, providing insightful perspectives to help managers succeed. I personally have the pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they are truly exceptional partners and savvy investors. Whether you are launching your first fund or your fifth, HMC welcomes the opportunity to partner with both developing and established managers. Have an idea you want to share with the team?

• 1:40Harry Stebbings?

  Just send it to [email protected]. And speaking of amazing partners with HMC there, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups. Apply in under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC-insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires, and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management, and their newly launched Mercury Treasury.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Cash management product for high growth startups and they'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, which is so cool. It's a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors. Head to mercury.com forward slash signup to apply. But it's now time for the show and I'm so excited to hand Over to William Hockey, co-founder at Column.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:37Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to do this one for a long time. We've met in London. We've met in LA. Finally, we've made it happen. So thank you so much for joining me today, my friend.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I appreciate having me. It's good to finally do this.

• 2:50Harry Stebbings?

  It is great if I need this. Now I want to start with a little bit of context. We see Plaid, we now have Column. How did you make your way into the world of startups? And what was that aha moment for you with Column most recently?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Maybe a little background on myself. So I probably am a slightly less traditional than a lot of people who maybe start companies. So I grew up on a farm area in central California and I grew up building everything. Right. So welding with my grandpa, building buildings with my dad. I always just liked building. I was probably less of the mathlete child genius, more the tinker and the builder. And going up to college, started programming. It was the only, I don't know, I think social accepted way to build things. Can't really do construction welding in college. So I started programming. I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to just do something. Started building a bunch of fun side projects with my best friend Zach. We ended up starting Plaid, which is a pretty large financial infrastructure company these days, together my senior year in college.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  And throughout that process, we are pretty large. You get a chance to work with a lot of financial institutions, a lot of kind of fintechs. Pretty much anybody building a financial services in the US is some way associated with Plaid. I got to see this market at a very intricate level and I realized pretty quickly that there's actually this massive market to actually start to build Inside the regulatory perimeter. What I was doing in a lot, like what 99.9% of Silicon Valley is doing Is building outside that regulatory perimeter. What I realized actually is you can drive a huge amount of value. If you actually jump in, be a regulated bank and actually build it from scratch. And so that's what we did. I've been wanting to do it for. Six plus years from a financial perspective, really only had the resources due over the past few.

• 4:24Harry Stebbings?

  But can I ask you bluntly, and this is probably a very stupid question. Why does everyone do it outside of the regulatory perimeter versus inside? Is it purely a pain of regulation and cost?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I think Silicon Valley really isn't set up to build regulated businesses. So what we had to do is we actually went out and we personally bought a financial situation. We bought an OCC regulated bank out here in California. And to think about the investment you have to put upfront and then the time you have to spend to actually do something that's pretty long. We've been doing this for almost three years and we will do this for many more years before we kind of get that hockey stick growth. Because being a regulated space, by design moves a lot slower and it has way more upfront build. It's not really a market that I could have started when I was 21 with Zach, right? If two kids in a garage are really smart engineers, which Silicon Valley does very well with, they can't really build this.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  It's just not really structurally set up to do that.

• 5:20Harry Stebbings?

  We're going to get to the structural setup for that. I want to start with a little bit of a therapy session. You mentioned obviously building with your father and your grandfather. I believe we're all very much a product of our histories. When you think about what you're running from and you're running towards, Will, what are you running from? And then second, what are you running towards?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  We're going to be totally honest here. Raised out in the country, very part of my upbringing and my family's like, work is what matters. I grew up in a very much you live to work type mentality, less so of like the pie in the sky and intellectual. That's really what drives me, right? I probably am still that person today. I am gritty, I like to work, I like to build for the society that we live in. I think a lot of times Silicon Valley and broader tech, we can kind of get a pie in the sky and only talk about like far off future. And I think I'm really bred as like, hey, let's go solve the problems that we have in front of us today. Less sexy, more pragmatic, a little bit more tangible. And I think that really drives me. To back that up, like what are you running towards? I see that similar vision, right? A lot of times people, you can get people in their two camps.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Are we building for a future that is maybe going to exist at 100 years? Intellectually sexy, super value, a lot of merit to that. I'm probably more the other camp, which is, hey, there are problems that we have today. We have to build and live in the world we're in. And if you dive into that and are super pragmatic and gritty, you can actually solve this in a really meaningful way.

• 6:41Harry Stebbings?

  I actually think that Silicon Valley is not that kind of intellectually idealistic build for a hundred years. The proliferation of sales analytics tools and marketing automation tools, incremental innovation that we see today that Peter Thiel chastises. I find almost it's a rarity to see that intellectual ambition of building for the multi-decade. Do you agree with me? What do you think I'm being unfair?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I think we definitely celebrate intellectual leadership for sure. I think we celebrate couching what is probably a pretty boring, practical problem. Large language, gonna go change the world, like, I don't know, maybe like building like an API for like e-commerce or something like that. I think when you take what we like to talk about and we like to celebrate, I think we definitely talk and celebrate that feature. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think as a founder, as a builder, you have to understand, hey, what are my strengths or what are my weaknesses? Am I an idealist or am I a pragmatist? And I think it's good to have that intellectual and self-clarification on yourself. And so you can really understand how you play and what you spend your time on.

• 7:44Harry Stebbings?

  I want to get to how you play and what you spend your time on. I think one thing we certainly idealize in Silicon Valley is the hero founder and the hero leader, which in some ways is good and in some ways not so good. But my first question there is, with that in mind, performance as a leader is pretty much everything. How do you think about high performance today? Having led these huge teams and plowed to great success, what does high performance mean to you?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I probably have a somewhat nuanced answer to this. Being able to be quiet, grinding and building in the shadows and be okay not being recognized, I think is the highest order of high performance. The first time around, when you first start building, like you want to be famous, maybe you want to be noticed. You want to get invited to cool parties. You want to make a ton of money. And so you think playing the angle to get that, that gives you validation that you're working at the highest level. But over time, you start to realize that actually what are the biggest orders of success? It's how long can you grind? And how quietly can you do this for as long as possible without external recognition? Any company of value takes at least 10 plus years to realize. And so it's all about how long can you do that?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And can you do that in the shadows? And I need the people that are able to do that, to be able to do that quietly and be very focused. How then external recognition, they are operating at the highest level? And they are the ones that are the most successful over time.

• 9:06Harry Stebbings?

  And it takes a very eager this person to not need that external validation. How do you think about your relationship with your own ego? And how's it changed from starting planned with Zach many years ago to today?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  I think everybody's face. Anybody that tells you that they don't need that myself or otherwise, they're lying to your face. Everybody craves that. I think it's just about how do you balance that? I mean, it's ironic that I'm sitting here saying that on your podcast. We'll take that at face value. But I do think over time, when I've seen the people around me that I think make the biggest difference and have honestly accumulated the most amount of capital. They aren't necessarily the ones that are going to be on the front cover of Fortune or the front cover of Forbes or the ones that are getting invited to the coolest parties. They're probably doing stuff that you don't really understand. That's complex. It's really boring. It's behind the shadows. Those are the ones that I try to follow. I'm far from perfect and definitely we all need some level of external recognition.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  But idealizing them over the ones that maybe everybody else does is something that I've really had to force myself over time to do.

• 10:08Harry Stebbings?

  Identity, I tie my identity to my company. It's very much me and who I am, which is why I hate going on holiday because you're suddenly detached from your identity. It's like, who the fuck am I and what the fuck am I going to do? How do you think about like your own identity and detaching it from what you do in your company?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  That's a very deep question. I think honestly, it's probably one of my superpowers. I stepped away from plat at its very peak to start something that was very high risk and in much smaller people are like, oh my gosh, how, why? I've had a couple of benefits. One is I've had this really strong group of friends that I've had way before I was successful and they're all still my best friends. I think a lot of people only hang out with founders or people that are like their economic caliber or whatnot. And the moment You do that really, you start to build your identity and your self-worth around wealth, fame, brand, your company. And those things are super ephemeral. What they also do is if you're so focused on keeping that, you're never going to take the bigger risks.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  But if you have a base that you can really fall back on and that kind of loves you and your friends that you hang out with, irrespective of who you are to the outside world, I think that makes you way more secure. It actually enables you to take much bigger swings.

• 11:18Harry Stebbings?

  I know you only hang out with me because of my wealth. Fine, fine, you just admit it. I only hang out with you during your hat, let's be real. I mean, listen, you're only human. I get you, but I don't like the family and the friends and they provide security to allow you to take the big swings. But so does the wealth bluntly. How do you think about your relationship to money? And especially, how do you think about the relationship between money and risk appetite?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I think I'm able to take a bigger second swing because I had validation in the first company before, like 100% have to be intellectually honest there. What enables you to do is I think enables you to buy time and work on things that have a maybe longer shelf life. The reward in the returns a little bit more elongated. Wealth, it does enable you to, hey, maybe take some time. I can work on a problem without having that like sense of urgency. Oh, like, hey, I need a job right now. I need to feed my family or something like that. And the kind of intensity in that fear, I think definitely drives much more need for immediacy. And when you remove that, you just be more thoughtful of a time.

• 12:22Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about changes in your leadership, one of the big ones for you is when I started my own fund, I was kind of like, oh shit, like really, it's on me now. Would that like specific one or two moments where you're like, I really had to change as a leader and as a person with this event?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I think more so what's been a change from that leadership style, I think at Column compared to Plaid. Plaid, very successful, has a lot of money. It was started and ran in the boom. We're in a different world right now and we're completely self-funded and employee-owned. We work in a world of constrained resources. Having a leadership style, we have much more constrained resources. When you have much more resources, it's very different. You have to be. Right, slightly more ruthless, a little bit more pragmatic. I think you have to focus on delegating a lot more. There's a lot of nuances, but I think it's probably more towards that resources issue necessarily as a pay as a second company or something like that.

• 13:13Harry Stebbings?

  So when you think about comparing Plaid and comparing Column, what did you decide to do very differently this time? Other than the funding, obviously with Plaid you took venture funding and here you didn't. Are there any other things that you were like, I really want to do it differently this time?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is. So I think if you look at a lot of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, they are abstractions around complexity. So if you look at Stripe or if you look at Twilio or you look at Plaid or something like that, right? They like identify this big problem. They're like, look at all these systems. They suck. It's really hard to use. We're going to write an abstraction on top of this and then we're going to make it really easy to use said system. This is a huge amount of self-advancement because it's a great market because you can start it with relatively limited capital. If you're just like a smart first principles thinker, good engineer, it's a relatively approachable problem set. What it doesn't totally do is it doesn't totally fix like the systemic issues.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Sometimes what you do is you are putting a little bit of lipstick on the pig. And I think what we get to do the second time, we're doing a column is we're saying, actually, let's go all the ways down. Let's go like all the ways down below all the turtles and say, hey, what's at that very bottom? You actually get a build from that bare metals. You don't have to worry about acting on the complexity. You're going to push all the complexity away and go all the way to the bottom. And that's really what we're doing at Column. I don't think I could have done that when I was 21. I don't think I could have done it with the resources and capacity and capabilities I had at the time. You can only really do it later on. And that is something I've been very lucky to do. And I'm not saying maybe one's a better business model, but it's just a different way to approach a problem.

• 14:46Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I find it fascinating when you look at businesses which are only available or possible to a certain type of founder or people because of the success before. That was changed. In terms of the same, what really worked and you were like, you know what? I've got to carry it across. This is really important and worked well. And I think that that was important.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that would be a good answer, but I think it is important. Plaid, my co-founder, I think is excellent and does that. I think we had a really good philosophy. Beyond this, you have to be very patient on hiring and you have to be willing to deal with a huge amount of pain, even if it hurts your business. One of the things that we had like a very clear ethos at Plaid is around we're gonna rate until we would get for that A candidate. Maybe it'll take 12 months, maybe it'll take 24 months, who knows? But we're gonna put everybody through a lot of pain in short term hurt the business because we're gonna wait for the right candidate. And everybody talks about it, but 99% of companies in Silicon Valley, they don't do it. They don't wait for the right candidate. And having that just exceedingly high bar, we have to F L A try my damnedest to do that at a call as well.

• 15:42Harry Stebbings?

  I don't think that you can, if you think about truly A star people, the point is they are the 1%. And if you think about scaling a company to 500 plus people, the very definition of 500 plus people is not 1%. But at some point, you have to have B team players or C team players even. I guess my question is, do you think it's possible to maintain such high standards at true scale?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Well, it depends, right? I think most companies shouldn't be 500 person companies. I think as we're learning and have learned that most companies that are over 1,000 people can probably do the same damn thing with 100 people. And so they got probably pushed back on the premise that you need that many people to solve a lot of the problems we're solving today. But I do understand your point, which is as you get to a point, they will have 1% or is on can wanna be employee like 1,200. Then you just kind of have to be very introspective on yourself and say, hey, I need soldiers and generals. Is this role, do I need a soldier or do I need that 1%? Not every role needs that A plus player. Sometimes it's actually the opposite, right? If you get an A plus player and they're in a role, they're not gonna be super happy. They wanna move quickly. You have attrition risk, they're gonna want new responsibilities in nine months or something like that.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So sometimes it's actually better to have that B player that's in it for the long period of time. But I think especially in the early days, you do need a lot of those As. And a lot of times we fool ourselves in thinking that, hey, the person right in front of me is one of those and they're really not.

• 17:01Harry Stebbings?

  When we think about those A players, I think I've said this before, but a lot of people have said to me, fine, Harry, but that's a luxury. I've got a runway that's decreasing fast and I'm gonna V C's putting pressure on me. How would you advise founders with runway that's going and V C pressure to hire and to execute at speed?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It's a really hard pickle. I do generally. Think this desire for speed and this desire to move quickly and hire a lot is a little bit of a false lie. I think companies can be built much more slowly than people think. As you look about a value creation over five to 10 year period of time, I don't necessarily know if the math adds up.

• 17:38Harry Stebbings?

  I always say speed of execution is everything. Help me out, understand why I'm wrong. Why is actually building slowly more advantageous?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Being thoughtful upfront actually takes a little bit more willpower because you have so much pressure on top of you. I've been bred in financial services and infrastructure software and stuff like that. We have hundreds of thousands of people relying on you. Actually pushing out features every single day doesn't really move the needle. Pushing out the right ones the right way is much more of a, an exponential move. If you're, you know, be real and you have Instagram right on your back, maybe that's a different execution strategy. But I think you have to understand where you are in the market and what level of execution you need to deliver at and at what pace.

• 18:22Harry Stebbings?

  I disagree with what you said earlier. Sorry, we can do-

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, hit me.

• 18:26Harry Stebbings?

  We're friends. Normally I'm not so direct. You said like, it's not the traditional venture funding business, given the upfront cost and given the duration and not having, I disagree with you. A business like Column is what venture was they actually designed for. Incredibly innovative businesses, but takes a lot of upfront capital, has long duration. This is what venture is meant to fund, not the SMB payroll management system that can be spun up with no code in a weekend.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Let's just be clear, SMB payroll is great and you should all use Column for all the SMB payroll companies out there. I mean, I agree with you philosophically. I think we have to look at it pragmatically and it's not really happening. I think the main reason is because Silicon Valley Venture broadly likes businesses that are relatively easy to understand, but most importantly, where great technology and great engineering is the main determinant for success. And if you look at some like Column, technology and building great developer products and being great developer infrastructure, yeah, that is a critical component, but it's one of many. Building really great risk management, building really great regulatory- Strategy, knowing how to throw some of the nuances in a lot of this regulatory move. And those are just as important as the technology.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And the problem is those you don't win by throwing more capital. Those are not capital starved problem areas. Their time and expertise is solved problem areas. And those is an area that a lot of people don't feel comfortable with. Because I think when you invest, you do have this 10 year payback period. And what is everybody looking at right now? It was like, oh my gosh, deal. It's the fastest company to get to 100 million ARR ever, right? That's the new metric. That's not going to happen in this space. It's not going to happen at my space. I'm the slowest company to like ever get to 100 million dollars in ARR ever. But I think if you look at it from a 20, 30 year perspective, the ability for us to generate 10, 50, 100 billion dollars, I think is very real. But it's going to be a slightly slow ramp to get there. And the determinant of that is not necessarily purely just technology.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  For me, at this stage, I think the longer you can de-risk that, the larger you can do it yourself. I think best sets me up and my employees up for success.

• 20:28Harry Stebbings?

  What you're saying is you want Harry Stebbings' money. And actually, the funny thing that I agree very different. If I took money, I would take it from you here. How about that? Oh, so I would even give you a hat then. Speaking of like capital deployment, one thing that I think a lot of people love to hear and it's health. It's an employee owned and you've obviously invested a huge amount into this business. When you think about kind of wealth planning for yourself, how did you structure your personal portfolio construction? You've got cash, property, you've got direct funds. How did you think about the right construction for you?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  It's an area that I'll be very candid, I'm not like you were thoughtful in. I'm engineered by training, I'm relatively single focused. I like to go deep in one thing. My ability to go broad in a lot of things is relatively weak. And I'm not an asset manager and I'm not an investor. I think I'm good, I hope I'm good at building companies. And so 99.9% of my wealth is in plating column. That's it. I've done some stuff and invested in great funds like yourself, a little bit on the edges. But I'd say that is very much the long tail, not the majority. I probably don't make a lot of portfolio construction. I think I can't think I did too much. I probably would have just taken that money and throw it all in some structured credit vehicles and made it on a compounding 8%. And that would make more money than investing in column over five to 10 year.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  However, I think investing in yourself as you think about from a 10, 20, 30, 40 year perspective, that's probably going to be the highest IRR can do. Even if it means you're probably gonna have way more risk. And I think from a five to 10 year horizon, it's probably not going to be as successful.

• 21:54Harry Stebbings?

  Do you believe the best CEOs are the best resource allocators?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Probably not. CEOs probably are a little bit too risk on. If you think about just pure financial allocators, maybe the public company CEOs are that come from more of an investment background. They think about pure tech CEOs. I think we're all a little bit like risk on, let's go build during these tumultuous times of the market. That strategy doesn't always work out if you were just a pure financial allocator.

• 22:19Harry Stebbings?

  Final question before we move away from you and company and move to the space. So one thing that just struck me when I hear about kind of your patience and willingness to wait. It's hard sometimes to imbue that with employees who want to see milestones, who want to see growth, who want to see momentum. How do you imbue that patience and willingness to wait in a team that is naturally ambitious and wants to see progress?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  We don't hire a lot of new grads. I think the youngest people in our team are like 26, 27, and the average age is over 30. That's probably lessened by design, that's more outside of self-selection. After you see a couple of companies booming for us, you start to recognize that coming out of the gate too strong can actually be a potential negative. And actually, real value is created over a longer period of time. And that really resonates for a category of people. And that really does not resonate for a category of people as well.

• 23:09Harry Stebbings?

  Isn't well, I've been quite opinionated because it's been on, you know, relative spaces that I know and understand. I'm about to become a lot more quiet as you educate me here. But I want to move a step away from you and your leadership to column in the industry that you sit in. You said to me before about the money supply chain problem. I didn't really have a good question following that. I Googled money supply chain problem. Fuck all. So can you expand on this? What is the money supply chain problem and why is it important?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Maybe it's all a start really. I can't what we are is we're a bank that directly offers APIs to anyone from developers, enterprises to move, fold and lend money. We could do that because we're a regulator. Prior to columns, making a little history here. Any business that wanted to offer financial services, whether it's a startup that's rethinking credit cards or a Fortune 50 company that's reimagining the payment systems or something. They had to work with all of these archaic middleware providers that wrapped this old school bank. So just something that has moved money between two bank accounts, that a developer would have to work with maybe a dozen vendors and write like a shit ton of spaghetti code. But it existed this way for decades because no matter how many times you rethink or you rebuild the technology into something slightly better,

• 24:22Speaker 01

  you actually aren't fixing the fundamental problem, which is the financial institution itself, the bank. Because what you're doing is you're building outside this regulatory perimeter. No matter what you're putting that lipstick on, you actually don't fundamentally control the protocol and you don't control the risk decisions at the bank. So you can never actually truly reimagine what it looks like. What you end up doing is you keep just adding more middleware providers. So what we did is we went out and we actually bought a bank, took on that regulatory heft, and we think that's really the only way to actually truly innovate in financial services. Going back to your question, which is, okay, what is that money supply chain? How do you solve that? Let's take a look at like a traditional supply chain problem. Take whatever T-shirt you're wearing. Say you're wearing some Hanes shirt. Maybe you got that thread from Inzia.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  They assemble it, someone in Vietnam, they ship it over to China, they make your T-shirt, goes through a port in Germany, and now you can buy it at Target. It's a Hanes branded shirt. Everybody thinks, oh, cool, like Hanes made this shirt. Actually, not really. There was like probably 20 people or 20 different businesses that took to construct that shirt. Money is actually not that different. So what I said is, if you want to move money, what happens? In the end, turtled all the ways down, the Fed just moves money from one account to another account. That's actually moving money. But in order for that to actually hit your bank account, it requires a huge amount of intermediaries because a bank is not a technology company. So let's go back to the example. If you want to move that money from one bank account to another, you actually need an inordinate amount of bank vendors and middleware providers to do that.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Probably five to 10 on every single side of the transaction just to move that one back. The reason is because banks aren't technology companies, right? They are simply just abstractions on top of the Fed. How I've really thought about it is what we are doing is we are simply just solving the supply chain. We're saying there's 20 things to solve this one very basic problem, which is building on top of the Fed. And we're just going to collapse all that in one and we're going to go straight to the Fed and do it ourselves.

• 26:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so you've got Fed and your consumer and then you've got intermediaries in the middle, say five each on each side. And then with you, you're saying, hey, let's have Fed and consumer and bring this together and get rid of all intermediaries in the middle.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:27Harry Stebbings?

  What do the intermediaries say?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  There's so many and they're so disparate. I don't think I've really heard a coherent problem statement yet. I think people have generally resonated with this problem. We're saying, yeah, actually, this is right. Building inside this regulatory perimeter is correct. If you're a big bank or something, you have so many different domains. You are solving a consumer's life from kind of cradle to the grave. They're going to offer you your first checking account, but they're also going to do your corporate debt offering when you're a massive corporation. And so I'm not quite sure they totally get how big of a paradigm shift has happened in financial services. I think probably in five years or something like that, when we're a little bit well, well known, I think they'll probably speak more with a unified voice.

• 27:05Harry Stebbings?

  And so just so I understand, what's the problem? The problem is the fees that the intermediaries bring because actually the process of moving money for me is not a problem. What is the problem? Is it the fees? Is it the time to move money? Why is this the problem?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  That's a great question. So I think one, it's around how developers build. I think we are going to get innovation in financial services, both in the US, in the EU, Pakistan or wherever, because people are going to want to build new companies in financial services. And you do that by lowering the barrier of entry. However, anytime you build in financial services, you have to build on top of a bank. And to do this right now, it takes nine, 12, 18 months. It's extremely painful. It's extremely expensive and you can only probably ship 10% of the products that you want. That inhibits a huge amount of growth and innovation. And so what happens? There's two things that happen. People just raise a bunch of money and deal with the pain. Or what do they do? They build outside the regulatory perimeter.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  They go build crypto exchanges in the Bahamas. They go build crypto exchanges in China and they go work outside the regulatory perimeter and end up causing a lot of consumer harm and they end up blowing up. Because they're building outside the regulatory perimeter. What we are saying actually is there's actually a nice middle ground, which is we can be a bank, we can be that regulatory entity, we can make sure everybody's building a very safe and sound way. But you also get to move super quickly. You could have great developer infrastructure. You do that at a really low cost. And that is actually going to have a massive boom in a really safe, fast-moving, really innovative financial products.

• 28:33Harry Stebbings?

  The consumer experience problem is then it's an inhibition of product expansion on financial services.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  What is the problem for the consumer experience that we're solving? So if you think about our business, I do not work with consumers. I do not work with businesses. The only people that we work with are people building new financial services, right? So maybe they're building a neo-bank. Maybe they're a vertical software company that wants to offer payments and lending to their customers. Maybe it's a big enterprise that wants to do treasury management differently. I don't know what the killer consumer product is, right? 10 years ago, it was Venmo and Square Cash revolutionized pure payments. Square Cash and Shine reinvented Gen Z neo-banking. Wealth management went through the gram. They were different sectoral areas that entered in building financial services. If I was super smart and I knew what the next thing was, I'd probably be doing that. The only thing is I know is it will happen.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And the trick for me is how do you build that plumbing? How do you build that infrastructure? So the next iteration, they can do that faster, better and cheaper. Because the moment you lower that barrier to entry, consumers just get way more options and way more flexibility. And also they get to do it in a relatively safe and regulated way. Because when you actually build inside the US financial system, you get a lot of inherent protections. So it's really important that we allow people to build inside of that in a very safe and efficient way. The moment you build outside of it, crazy shit can happen.

• 29:52Harry Stebbings?

  It's been something that you've said to me before, though, where again, I was like, oh, sounds good. No idea what it means. He said, the US financial system can be a protocol or can function like a protocol. What did you mean by this? And how does the US financial system potentially function like a protocol?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  This is going to feel very passionate about. Maybe kind of a niche thing if you're passionate about. But there's a general consensus that we're at a decline in the US financial system and the US dollar. If you look at the crypto community and the EU, China, everybody has made these compelling arguments that say, in order to keep innovating, we need to burn the system down and build something from scratch. And I think you agree that there's a lot of aspects of the US financial system that are broken and they aren't working for majority of people. However, I think what people miss is actually what is broken is the implementation of the US financial system that's flawed, not the underlying protocols of product. What do I mean by that? So you hear all these tropes in financial services about, oh my gosh, everything's built up,

• 30:50Speaker 01

  built like Cobalt, or if we have super slow payments in the US, they're built on this rickety infrastructure. That what they're talking about, they're not actually talking about the underlying protocols at the Fed or TCH or kind of like the really bull inside the US financial system. What they're talking about and complaining about is the outdated implementation of these protocols by all of these legacy banks. All of this is so entrenched and previously there were no alternatives. So we came to conflate big banks and the implementation of the financial system as the financial system. What we're doing, what we feel passionate about, if you rip all that crap away and you go all the ways down to say, hey, what is available to you as a bank? What are the services that the Fed offers? What can you do here?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Actually, it's quite powerful. You can actually accomplish, I'd say, kind of 90, 95% of what crypto wants and what people want. By actually building this from scratch, by actually looking at the protocol layer and not getting distracted by how it's been implemented. You can build this entire thing from scratch in a really new way that actually meets a lot of the requirements of what people want. When you say we could do 90, 95% of what people expect and want from crypto by innovating on the protocol layer, what does that actually look like in reality? Let's say something like inner day, 24/7 payments, something that people always talk about. A lot of what people like about Ethereum, you can set it 24/7, 365. You can set it at like relatively low cost. And so you can settle with all these intermediaries. You know what? You can actually do that not by the Fed.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  I can't send a wire past 4pm? That has nothing to do with when you can actually send a wire at the Fed. It's all about when the bank is open for you to send that wire. You start to kind of look at all these tropes that people complain about and you realize that actually that's the implementation by the bank. The underlying thing is actually quite strong. So as we think about proof of verification reserves, as you think about intermediaries, you think about counter bars, you think about faster payments. All of that stuff you can do. People like it in crypto, but you can also do it inside the US financial system, which I think is something people really miss. You can't do it right now with a lot of the banks. That's a flaw to banks, not a flaw to financial.

• 32:59Harry Stebbings?

  Is it on the chain?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  You know, it's not going to be on the chain, which is probably that 5% of what people think about. But when you look at it from a problem side, I don't think that's necessary.

• 33:08Harry Stebbings?

  I just think your wedding crashes, then we're going to put the picture on the line. Why do you guys sign? You go to a restaurant in the US and people sign for things. It's like we're doing scrolls in ancient Greece. In the UK, we have font fable.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Harry Stebbings?

  Is this implementation?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am too, somewhere. That's a total shit.

• 33:24Harry Stebbings?

  Really? The US financial system always make it off. Who's got the best financial system? Which country are you like? Yes, they've done it well.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I think there's different pieces. The US has the dollar, which is probably the strongest implement, probably inherently, bar none, makes the US the best financial system, but it's really because of our currency. As you think about a lot of the technology, I think China has innovated on the financial system very quickly. I think there's probably a lot of stuff that you can take away from that and we can learn from. I don't think we want the Chinese financial system. Ready, you can recognize that they're a part of it. That's quite interesting and we can maybe apply it to the US.

• 33:58Harry Stebbings?

  And what can we learn from the Chinese financial system, do you think?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  The decision-making process in the US is quite slow. There's some benefits to that. It's a little slightly more democratic, but there's a lot of players in and they make things move at a relatively slow pace. China, as we think about payment systems and think about regulatory and stuff like that, there's only a couple of decision makers. And so the pace at which they can move and adapt to a changing world order is pretty incredible. We obviously don't want that top-down authoritarianism in the US, but I think we need to recognize for a regulatory standpoint, a system standpoint, in order for us to keep pace with China, something probably has to change because they are making leaps and bounds on a financial system perspective that we probably are slightly. A little bit slower to adopt.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Is there a way that we can do this without fundamentally reinventing the political system and structure in the US? I give you the keys to the kingdom, Will. Go. There is this trope in the US, right, is we have a lot of regulation, we have no regulation. Democrats are like, let's go regulate everything. The Republicans are like, get rid of our regulation, it's bad. You need to find balance, because we need regulation to be light enough that people actually want to innovate inside the regulatory perimeter. I think crypto is a really good example for this, is the US is in many ways punished crypto companies like Coinbase or whatnot, that are trying to innovate inside the regulatory perimeter, but what happens? Ninety-five percent of trading actually just goes overseas, outside of kind of that protective umbrella, and ends up blowing up. And so what's actually happened is that to have punishing regulation

• 35:25Speaker 01

  has actually caused more consumer harm. But if we have absolutely no regulation, then it's a wild west and that's really bad. And so the regulator is going to focus on, hey, how do we allow people to actually move quickly? So we can attract people to build inside the financial system, which makes everything stronger and safer, but not go too far in the extreme, where we just push everybody to the gray and the black. I don't think we found that balance. I think the FTX blowing up will probably, hopefully, push us in the right direction there. But I think we do have maybe a little bit of ways to go. How do you think that pushes us in the right direction? Does it not actually just increase the bureaucracy and increase consumer protections because of the awareness of what can happen when things go wrong? I'm not a fortunate chance. I don't know what it's going to have. I'm probably a hopeless optimist.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  But if we don't allow the good players, like your Coinbase, et cetera, to move quickly and actually be able to innovate, those people are going to go somewhere. People want this stuff. And so then they're just going to go to the sketchy black market stuff. And that's actually going to create a lot of consumer harm. The regulators can potentially get some meat on their face, because then people will be like, hey, you didn't protect me. That's an optimistic take on it. The other take is it swings so far in the other direction, knowing that a shand happens or something like that. But then I think you'll start to see more things just go to the black market and more stuff blow up over time. Whether we figure that out on a five-year time horizon, I don't know. I hope so. I think there's fabulously smart people in government. I think they do understand this. I'm optimistic that they'll figure it out. I think any person that said this.

• 36:50Harry Stebbings?

  To see smart people in government. I don't know if you've been to the UK. Coinbase today, you look at the stock and it's like, oh, what happens to Coinbase?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I hope they do really well because I think what they have tried to do very well is they've tried to embrace regulation. They've tried to do things the right way. They've tried to do things that are right by the regulators and they're right by consumers. And in many ways, they've gotten punished because what's happened is there's been all these other players that do not play by the rules. That can move so much quicker and do so much different. So consumers are naturally going to go to that one, like FTX or whatnot. That's really scary for the health of the US financial system, for the health of people like me that are trying to innovate and trying to do things in the right way. I hope they do well because that will be a big determiner. I think a lot of the success in the industry.

• 37:34Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask, forward looking, and then we'll do a quick fire. Let's project ourselves 10 years out. A pretty unfair thing to do. How will the next 10 years for fintech look different to the prior 10 years, do you think?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  One of the things that I do know is the financial brands that we think of are changing. We talked about this a little bit before, but the idea of these large banks that are going to service a consumer, create a degree. I don't think is going to happen. It's not going to succeed over the long term. I think what tech has taught us over the past 20 years is if you go solve a niche problem and you do it very well, you will win in the long term. Like Salesforce builds excellent software for enterprises. It's hard to imagine over the long term that they aren't going to be the dominant financial brand selling to enterprises. Because they know that audience, they know how to build that really well.

• 38:21Harry Stebbings?

  So I think what's going to happen there, are you talking about bundling or unbundling? Because the way you started, I thought you were talking about delivering a superior product to a niche audience. But then when you think about Salesforce, it's actually many products to actually relatively increased audience now, or very increased audience. Are you doing unbundled or bundled?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Maybe Salesforce is, maybe Salesforce 10 years ago is a better example, but let's look at something like Procore, right? A vertical software, which is you have these people that are building, I know this audience, maybe it's a construction person, it's a gardener, it's a plumber, whatever. I know their needs really well. And so what my specialty is, is building software directly for them. Thinking about financial services, it's a relatively commoditized thing. I think long term. They are the ones that are going to, they have that consumer, they have a low CAC on that consumer, they already have them in their pipeline. And so delivering ancillary software, if you view financial services as software, which it kind of is, they are the ones that are going to win that vertical over time. And so I think just like Square Cash or Chime or whatever, they know their one audience quite well.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  They will win. And so I think over the next 10 years, the new financial brands that will win over time and that will be that dominant player are already probably brands today. They just aren't financial services brands. For what happened is these large banks that you and I have heard of will probably dissipate behind the scenes. They will provide a much more behind the scenes role like me. And the banks that cannot adapt to playing behind the scenes will probably cease to exist.

• 39:46Harry Stebbings?

  So I have two questions for you. One is, what do you think is the difference between people who are able to make a niche product superior, but then transition out into a much more broad services play with many different products? What's the difference between a niche product that delivers superior type service and sells to one of these big brands and big platforms versus one that becomes one itself?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  For one of the things that I believe is that both technology and financial services are becoming increasingly commoditized. And so building software is cheaper and easier than it's ever been. What's most important is to have an audience and to know that customer. And if you have a lock on that customer and you know them, you have a relationship with them and you know how they make decisions, you are best set up for success long term. Because whether you're offering them financial services or you're building them a SaaS app or something like that, those things have become commoditized and they are cheap. That is the most valuable. I think I'm slightly more bearish on the people that like, hey, I have this broad portfolio of products and I'm going to go sell this to a broad portfolio of audiences. The people that know their audience, know their swim line and do really well,

• 40:52Speaker 01

  those are the people that I think are going to win over the next 10 to 20 years.

• 40:55Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that these potential incumbents of the future, do you think that they will be able to acquire, given the tightening regulatory environment around competition? And I think we're going to see a real constriction in terms of the amount of acquisitions that happen? Of these niche providers, do you think that they will be able to consolidate in the way that we discussed?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  I think it's probably less consolidation from an M and A perspective. I do agree with you. I think acquiring is probably going to be much more challenging over the next 10 years. And so I think you'll probably see these people just build more in-house. It's kind of why I exist is a lot of my sales pitch is like, hey, financial services can be a commodity service. Build on top of us, you can build this regulatory perimeter and you can offer this service cheaper, better, faster, stronger to your consumer and again 10x around the nail. That pitch is quite compelling and I think you will see that trend more. I think it will be less of a roll up, but there's three people that dominate industry and it's going to go to two to one. I think you have to see the deal jake, especially if the executive branch stays where it is. I think that will diminish for good or for bad.

• 41:54Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, I promise you, you said there about vertical specialists. You mentioned Pro Call, which is a brilliant vertical specialist. Do you think we'll see that over Apple have long suggested towards and had kind of financial ambitions? Over the aspirational, beautiful brands which consumers resonate with?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say Apple is actually like the original vertical specialist is what do they know? They knew consumers really well. What are the reasons that Microsoft, I think, has always troubled the consumers? Microsoft knows enterprise well, Apple knows consumers well. I think Apple just happens to have the largest vertical play out there. There's a reason you don't see a lot of Apple products in the enterprise. You don't see Apple servers or something like that. They don't really know that market. They know the consumer market super well. They happen to play in the largest vertical, but I kind of view Apple as a specialized player, just like Pro Core is, just like AppFolio is or something like that.

• 42:42Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think will be the largest bank in 10 years that isn't around today?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  I think we'll probably be the largest bank out there. Some of these large vertical software companies will probably be the dominant financial services players over the past 10 years. I don't think there'll be regulated banks. I think the banking functionality will still be offered to banks. I think you can see Goldman and JP Morgan move very aggressively into this. I mean, that's where Goldman's strategy is going forward, which is pretty similar to mine. And so the banks right now that understand that, I think, are going to do very well. I think the banks that kind of view themselves as still like, hey, we know our consumers, we know our businesses. We're going to offer you Cradle of Grave. I think they're done on arrival.

• 43:18Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, that's Goldman, if asked. BF doesn't buy them, which according to him is very possible likelihood. Now, I want to move into a quick fire, my friends. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Stressful. Okay, let's do it.

• 43:29Harry Stebbings?

  I said certainly fine. What books are you reading that you love or that you recommend?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I love and obsessed with commodities. I think there's a great book that was written in the sixties called Berchins of Grain. It's wonderful. Not super approachable, kind of maybe more approachable versions in that is a recent book by my Bloomberg reporter called The World For Sale. It's a story of commodity traders. It's a phenomenal book.

• 43:49Harry Stebbings?

  I've never had either on the show before. I knew you weren't going to do hard thing about hard things. So tell me, what do you believe the most around you disbelieve, Will?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Call the email saved lives. No matter how powerful, rich or famous you are, I think just skipping the warm intro and going straight to a call the email and following up three times is like the most valuable skill set you have. I built my career on just like call emailing people a ton and bothering them. And I think it's phenomenal. Like a lot of times people wait too much to try to find an intro or trying to network their way into something. And if you just bomb blast somebody, they're usually going to respond.

• 44:19Harry Stebbings?

  I remember when I was eighteen, I called email Jack Dorsey when I was in San Francisco and he responded and I was like, wow, this works. Yeah. What's your biggest strength? What's your biggest weakness, Will?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I think I'm a hopeless optimist. I think you're gonna have to be a founder, but I tend to always believe that things are gonna work out. They do things and I have an extremely high pain tolerance. And I also have the ability to go super detailed on really boring ass problems. I think on the weaknesses side, I have actually pretty massive social anxiety. I can fake it for a bit and pretend I'm social, but I'll probably end up running away by the end of the night.

• 44:51Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, I did not know that. Ha, you bring such great.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I like an extreme introvert, like on the extreme.

• 44:57Harry Stebbings?

  This isn't in the schedule. Your wife is your co-CEO, correct?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yes, she is.

• 45:00Harry Stebbings?

  What is the best thing? What is the worst thing?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I think the best thing is, oh, you have aligned incentives. I think incentives, it's the kind of the cause for most of our decision-making framework. And when you start it with a spouse, you have perfectly aligned incentives. So I think that's super, super important. I think the worst thing, right, is you don't really have too much of a balance between your personal professional life. It's something I've never strived for too much, but I think you can definitely be taxed over time when kind of work is a dominant part of your life 24/7.

• 45:28Harry Stebbings?

  Talk dirty to me. Did we get those compliance? Check, Stan.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It's the most painful lesson that you're also pleased to have gone through. When we almost sold my previous company Plaid to Visa at a pretty good time in the market back in 2020. And it ended up getting blocked by the Department of Justice for anti-justice issues. It's kind of like the first part of that phase. I think it was super painful, even the simple process of cons for not to get through. But I think what you realize is that things can still happen, even if they aren't correct or rational. And the government is in the end the decision maker. That changes a lot of ways how you think about life and you think about product building. Is you have to view, I think, government and stuff like this as a static entity that's probably not going to change. And I think you need to build with that knowledge in the back of your head. It was a really good lesson for me is I don't think it was fair. I don't think it was correct, but it doesn't, my opinion doesn't matter.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Is that the government is a decision maker that go to the debt.

• 46:20Harry Stebbings?

  How do you continue to motivate people who see a massive windfall coming? And then it's like, oh, no, not happening.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  You raise a triple evaluation nine months later.

• 46:30Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, that helps. Moving away from something rather transactional, children wise, what do you want your children to adopt? Three traits.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Ruthless pragmatism is one, and then the other was the kind of williest to better yourself and having that self-confidence to do that.

• 46:43Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest investing miss and how did it impact your mindset?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Speaking of SBB payroll, I actually, I had a chance to invest at the seed on deal. Ended up paying up a little bit for the Suzanne deal, then ended up being a phenomenal outcome. But it's okay to admit when you're wrong and be like, hey, I missed this. And then if you see it again and it's way more expensive, it's okay to pay up the second time around.

• 47:03Harry Stebbings?

  Mate, I missed a seed, I missed the A, I missed the B every time. I know, we use it. Anyway, do boards really add value?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's stage and director dependent. Having a great board and great investors is definitely not good enough to be a good company.

• 47:16Harry Stebbings?

  If you could only have one board member, who would you have?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Depends on the space I'm in. I think somebody who has enlightened sentences with. At the moment, you have misaligned sentences with the board members. I've always liked having phenomenal board members with a plaid and column. But I think I've seen some friends go the other way with board members that maybe are in it for something different. And I think that can be pretty problematic.

• 47:34Harry Stebbings?

  I'll take the seat. It's okay. I'll do it for free. For the love of Will, I'll do it. What would you most like to change about venture?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say the same thing about founders. And so I was kind of talking about tech as a class. I think generally as a whole category, we're sycophants. I think generally we need to remember in venture that cash is green. And everyone should just admit that venture is just capital allocation and private tech. It's more like being a mutual fund manager than an operator, maybe present company excluded. But pretending otherwise is probably anything but a distraction. Money is necessary and it's necessary to create massive businesses. So it's a necessary part of the supply chain, but we should treat it what it is. Maybe not as much as we do right now. I say to founders at the start of calls, listen, we sell cash for a living, which means we get very good at selling. Don't take any of the selling bit, really at all. Well, final one, hit me. What does the next 10 years hold for you?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  I'll give my personal answer. Probably I'll have four mental breakdowns. And I'll probably be doing the exact same thing I'm doing right now with way more gray hair. I think we should recognize that startups are fucking hard. I've never found anything more fun, but the world probably moves slightly slower than we think. Jared, thanks for having me. I do appreciate it. Thank you.

• 48:41Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic show to do. If you want to see more from us, you can find us on YouTube by searching for 20VC. Likewise, we'd love to see you at 20vc.com. But before we leave you today, Harvard Management Company is constantly seeking out the next generation of great investors and entrepreneurs. HMC has managed Harvard University's endowment for nearly 50 years and was one of the first institutional investors in venture capital. Their experience and long-term investment horizon make some ideal partners to get world-changing ideas on a path to viability and success. They work as a true partner, providing insightful perspectives to help managers succeed. I personally have had the pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they are truly exceptional partners and savvy investors. Whether you are launching your first fund or your fifth,

• 49:26Harry Stebbings?

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• 50:09Harry Stebbings?

  Raise, which is so cool. It's a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors. Head to mercury.com/signup to apply. As always, I so appreciate your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode on Monday with the one and only Martine Casado at Andreessen Horowitz.