How Vise Hit $22B in Platform Assets, Reshaping The $83T Wealth Industry

Samir Vasavada joins Molly O'Shea on Sourcery to share how he and his co-founder Runik Mehrotra launched Vise as teenagers and scaled it to over $22 billion in platform assets with their leanest team ever: just about 40 people. After a record-breaking Q2 and 1275% YoY growth, Vise is leading the shift to Wealth 3.0 with personalized, automated portfolios that go beyond mutual funds and ETFs. Backed with $130 million in funding at a $1B valuation from Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and Allen & Co, Vise uses AI to help advisors build, manage, and explain portfolios across nearly every asset class and client type. Since recording this episode Vise has grown from $15B to $22B platform assets in just a few months. In this episode, Samir breaks down: • Bootstrapping Vise at 16: From seed to unicorn in 18 months • Raising $130M from investors like Sequoia, Founders Fund, + Allen & Co • How Vise saves clients $60M+ in taxes • What tech billionaires actually do with their equity • The $10T RIA opportunity—& why the legacy wealth stack is broken • Retail demand for private credit, real estate, & alternative assets • Global wealth shifts from London to Dubai, Milan, & Southeast Asia • Why scaling back from 150+ employees to 40 made the company stronger “There needs to be one platform that is functionally the platform that powers the global multi-trillion dollar asset management industry. And it will be Vise” Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea Samir on X: https://x.com/samir_vasavada Visit Vise: https://vise.com Brought to you by: • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel. As a Sourcery subscriber you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s), white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, & access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) Visit: brex.com/sourcery • Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. Visit: turing.com/sourcery • Kalshi—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: kalshi.com/sourcery • Fourthwall—The #1 way to sell merch online — Fourthwall is the easiest way to launch a fully branded merch store—used by big brands like MKBHD, Acquired, & even the Smithsonian. 100+ products. No upfront cost. Visit Fourthwall to start today: https://fourthwall.com/ Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Chapters: (00:00) $83T Market → Vise Hits $22B platform assets, 1275% YoY Growth (01:30) Founding Vise at 16 & Becoming a Unicorn in 18 Months (03:04) Pivoting to $10T Enterprise RIA Market (05:28) Lean 40-Person Team → Fastest Growth Ever (06:23) What Vise Actually Does (10:23) State of Retail Market: $83T in wealth, $2T+ in Access to Alts (22:45) $63M+ Saved via Daily Tax-Loss Harvesting (24:38) Servicing Clients from $200 to $150M Accounts (30:45) Why Zuckerberg & Elon Take “$0 Salaries” (32:42) Billionaire Playbook: Financing Homes & Jets via Stock Loans (39:21) Scaled to 150 Employees to “Refounding” with 40 “Barrels” (Keith Rabois Strategy) (43:20) Vision: World’s Biggest Tech-Powered Asset Manager

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Wealth market in the US alone is $83 trillion in assets. The enterprise RIA market, it's today around $2 trillion in assets. Over the next five to seven years, that market will go from $2 trillion in assets to $10 trillion in assets. We want to build the world's largest asset manager entirely powered by a technology platform.

• 0:18Molly O'Shea?

  You recently tweeted this, but you hit over $15 billion in platform assets for your clients. A massive unlock in the last year, over 1,500% year-over-year growth with your leanest team ever of 41 people. You've created over $63 million in tax savings for your clients and saved over 200K hours for 100 firms on behalf of 30,000 accounts.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  They're like, what business does this like 16-year-old kid have building software for financial advisors? Honestly, come to think about it, I'm like, kind of weird. Why was I building software for financial advisors when I was 16? But I was able to kind of figure out how to raise money and tell the story coinciding with a great market pretty quickly. So we went from seed to unicorn in like 18 months, which was kind of insane. So like, when you read those stories of like, blah, blah, blah, tech billionaire buys $50 million house, $100 million house, all cash paid. They're not paying in all cash. What they're doing is-

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  And then what about the private jets?

• 1:14Speaker 00

  That's a whole other, like, that's, I mean, there's all kinds of different ways people finance these things.

• 1:30Molly O'Shea?

  Samir, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be on this legendary pod.

• 1:35Molly O'Shea?

  I know, and we have like the coolest set ever.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  This is the coolest podcast set I've ever been on in my entire life.

• 1:40Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  I've been on a lot of podcasts.

• 1:42Molly O'Shea?

  I feel like we're set to like start some like Martha Stewart.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  You would crush it as a millennial Martha Stewart.

• 1:51Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I have full faith in you.

• 1:52Molly O'Shea?

  All right, that's the goal. So I want to talk to you today about a couple of topics from wealth management, the liquidity crunch, global trends in finance, as well as Vise's pretty big growth. You've hit some major unlock in the last year.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been very exciting. It only happened eight years later.

• 2:14Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so I'm gonna read this out because you recently tweeted this. But you hit over 15 billion in platform assets for your clients. A massive unlock in the last year. Over 1,500% year-over-year growth with your leanest team ever of 41 people. How did you accomplish this?

• 2:34Speaker 00

  So there's a lot in this tweet, but if we had to break it down, I would state first, there was market trends that were wildly in our favor. So when we first started the company, the belief was a lot of financial advisors were breaking away from big institutions, the Morgan Stanleys, the Merrill Lynch's, the UBS's of the world, and creating these independent RIAs. And these independent RIAs were used to having, it was called a managed account solution, but think about it as people at these big institutions that would build portfolios, they would manage those portfolios, they would trade those portfolios, they would do all the work on those portfolios, so those advisors could focus on managing their client relationships. But then when they went independent, they didn't have any of that. So our vision was, how can we provide that Shopify-like operating system for them to

• 3:17Speaker 00

  be able to build personalized portfolios at scale and focus their time and energy on delivering the best possible client relationships? The challenge was, while we were right that this was a huge problem and this was a need, the thing we were wrong was, a lot of this trend took place shortly after the financial crisis, so up until the early 2010s, and unfortunately, I was 10, 11 years old, so I couldn't have really captured it at that time. And the advisors started to get really old. So the average age of a financial advisor was, at the time we started the company, 56, 57, 58, and they were starting to think about retirement. And what was interesting about when they were thinking about retirement was, even if a better solution came, they weren't necessarily jumping at the bit to unlock new growth with technology, they were looking to start to think about sunsetting their

• 4:01Speaker 00

  practice, selling it, the succession that moved on. So it led into this trend, which was the roll-up. And firms getting acquired by larger, private equity-backed institutions to get rolled into one centralized large RIA, and that large RIA needed to find deficiencies in their investments. So we pivoted and evolved our strategy to, instead of... Focusing on the small mom and pop shop RIA firms that we had originally built the foundation of the company on. Let's sell into the big enterprises and those enterprises had tens of billions of dollars of private equity financing across, their collective growth. They had rolled up trillions of dollars in assets and we were powering a lot of their growth. So we started to see all the fruits of our labor. It took us two years to build an enterprise product.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  You know, finally start to materialize, you know, last year and now this year quite significantly. So that was kind of the first big insight. The second one was kind of like from a business building perspective. We had always been trained or told you need to hire a lot of people. You need to, you know, raise money, a lot of money. You need to hire a lot of people and then you need to put those people on, you know, a myriad of different problems. I think a real learning was the alpha was in hiring a small amount of people that are high agency, that are high ownership, that could take on a lot, you know, as Keith or Boy says, your barrels, you know, find a lot of key barrels and then find the right ammunition that's really support them. And I think we,

• 5:28Speaker 00

  found those people and they propelled us to grow even faster and, you know, leaner than when we had a lot of people. So it was a learning from that perspective as well.

• 5:38Molly O'Shea?

  And so how big is this market and the opportunity that you have in front of you?

• 5:43Speaker 00

  The wealth market in the US alone is 83 trillion dollars in assets. So that's if you add up all of the RIAs out there, all the wealth managers, just all the wealth managed by, call it intermediaries or financial advisors. If you segment it to the enterprise RIA market, it's today around $2 trillion in assets. Over the next five to seven years, that market will go from $2 trillion in assets to $10 trillion in assets. And with that, there's going to be a ton of growth. So we are right now the only purpose-built platform that is focusing on that enterprise RIA segment. So ideally, as the market really expands, we're going to expand with it.

• 6:19Molly O'Shea?

  So how exactly does Vi's work? What is the product?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  So the product is, you can almost think about it as your central operating system, your central nervous system for all things portfolio management. So the simple way to think about it is, we can take in inputs about a client. So your age, your net worth, your goals, your risk tolerance, your tax preferences, your concentrated position. So maybe you worked at Apple for a long time or another public company, or maybe you work at a private company that's going public and you have a big concentrated stock position. All of this information about the end client to build a personalized portfolio of individual stocks, bonds, and alternative assets that are uniquely personalized to that end client. And then we trade that portfolio. So thinking about rebalancing and cash management, tax loss harvesting, and then we provide reporting on that portfolio.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  So here's what's going on in your portfolio and why it's happening. So there's a regional banking crisis, your regional banking stocks took a hit. Here's how your portfolio took a hit, and here's how you're going to do towards your retirement goal. But you can think about it as anything that touches the money, Vi's handles. What's unique about it is that we can service any kind of underlying strategy. So we fit into what's called a model. So these enterprise RIAs or RIAs have model frameworks. So I think this about the markets. I think that China is going to outperform and Europe is going to underperform, and I want to weight my conservative clients towards equities and low volatility equities and a little less fixed income. So I'm going to have a model that fits that viewpoint that I'm taking on the market. And they'll probably have tens, if not even hundreds, of these models.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And they want to fit all of their individual clients into these models. So we will power these top-level models, and then within the model, allow them to customize for each individual client, all the things I just talked about. Individual risk tolerance, taxes, concentrated stock positions, exclusions, you name whatever it might be. Maybe they really care about the environment and they want to invest in environmentally and friendly companies. So we can control it from an enterprise standpoint of the overarching investment strategy and the end client strategy of what they're looking to get out of their portfolio. Sorry, it's a little bit of a mouthful, but I don't know if it makes sense.

• 8:26Molly O'Shea?

  No, that does. That's really helpful. Sorcery's audience is actually full of a lot of RIAs, and they come to us for access to some technology news and trends and investment stuff on the private market side with VC, private equity, IPOs, that kind of thing. But I'm very curious, from your perspective...

• 8:46Molly O'Shea?

  Including RIAs, let's say, other family offices, I work for a family office, and wealth managers, and other kinds of sophisticated investors. This topic is really timely right now because the market is so volatile. But how are you seeing portfolios shift?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  So the main way I'm seeing portfolios shift is, one, which a lot of people can point out is a rise in passive, right? So most people, you know, 20 years ago would say they're making all their money in active bets. They're going to pick stocks, they're going to find active mutual funds, they're finding a manager who thinks they're going to outperform, and this was usually expressed in the form of a mutual fund. And now everyone's realizing the real alpha is just buying the market and holding on to it for a long time. But the interesting thing is that buying the market is no longer buying the market. So if you buy the S and P 500, you're not actually buying the whole stock market. You're buying, you know, there's private companies now that are carrying significant market caps that should have gone public, but they're not, they're still private. There's, you know, other types of fixed income instruments, there's all kinds of things,

• 9:49Speaker 00

  there's private equity, that you are not getting in your portfolio. So the key is, how do you buy a index-like portfolio across the whole market and all the available asset classes? So I think the biggest trend is the merger or the blend of private markets and public markets coming together in one place in one orchestrated system, which is what we're aspiring to build. We call it the Total Portfolio Solution. And then also trying to understand what should go into that portfolio that will represent that kind of custom index that you're looking to try and build.

• 10:23Molly O'Shea?

  And what's your view on the democratization of alternatives from private equity, real estate, venture capital? How are you seeing this in the view of affluent markets?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  So... It's interesting, and it's interesting because it benefits both sides. So if you look at the side of the managers, most managers are tapped out on LPs. So if you go, if you're starting a venture fund tomorrow, or you're starting a new middle market private equity fund, and you're going to go pitch the traditional pension funds, endowments, political issues aside, they don't have capital to allocate into venture because their marks, because of how well venture has performed, has now taken up more than the allotted allocation they had in their funds. So if you're a venture manager and trying to go raise Fund III or Fund IV, or you're a private equity fund, you're trying to raise your first fund, or a bigger second fund, you have to understand, where am I going to go get my money?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Sovereign wealth funds can't really invest in me, maybe they can, but they're only investing in the biggest funds. Endowments are over allocated to venture, pension funds are over allocated to venture. So the real opportunity is, well, retail. And there's way more assets in retail than there are across all of these other aspects combined. There's $83 trillion. And sub 3% of it, sub 2% of it, is like less than $2 trillion, is in what you would call alternative assets today, which means there's a massive, massive opportunity to sell alternatives into retail, specifically affluent retail. And then if you're an affluent retail investor, you've been hearing about alternative investments for a long time, but you haven't had access to any of it.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  And now, for the first time, you have access to alternative investments. The worry, or the concern, is are these affluent investors going to be shown the best alternative investments? Or are they going to be shown investments that might not necessarily get them where they need to, and there's a liquidity concern, and there's constraints, and they get burned, and it causes a lot of people to lose a lot of money, which forces a regulatory reset? Or, on the other end, do you give some of these managers more money than they need? And do you inflate the entire market, which I think is a whole other issue? Definitely happens. So this is going to be Pandora's box when retail... The retail code is finally cracked for a lot of these private managers.

• 12:48Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, we have seen a lot of that, especially more recently in the venture capital industry. CARTA put out a report a couple of months ago on different LP trends and about 50% are not allocating into venture anymore. And so that's being cut away. I'm sure that's going to decrease even more. But even as you're talking about this, liquidity crunch is a real thing and people are looking to secondaries very often. And many different kinds of vehicles for that. Have you, what is your experience with the secondary market?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  So a lot of alternative asset managers are building like GP secondary platforms. The question is just how do you price the secondaries? So there's no, like, it's more art than science to some degree on like how you price a lot of these secondaries. Because like you'll see, because there's been no DPI, you know, GPs want their carry check and there's been no carry. LPs want, you know, they're coming up on, you know, needing to fund liabilities or reallocate the capital. So they need the liquidity. So now you're trying to find a lot of, you know, venture funds coming to market or other private equity funds saying, hey, we need liquidity. Here's what our portfolio looks like.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  We think, given the last round marks of these companies or the way these, you know, private equity instruments were last valued, here's what it should be. But, you know, how is the secondary platform going to understand? I think this is a fair mark for Platts or Brex or Ramp or pick your company that fit in these, you know, early-stage funds.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Because no one really quite knows.

• 14:25Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Molly O'Shea?

  I'm just thinking, like, in terms of alts in general, are RIAs coming to you asking for access to them or is it really just for retail?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  So retail, when I think about RIAs, I think about retail because their clients are retail. So that's typically what we mean when we say a retail customer versus like, say, a Robinhood investor, right?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  If we think about, because a vast majority of the retail wealth is actually managed with, you know, RIAs or wealth managers of some type. RIAs are coming in troves and their clients are coming in troves, asking for alternatives. So platforms like Case and iCapital have taken off in recent years, simply as a result of RIAs need access to private markets. But for a while, they've only really been limited for the last couple of years to mainstream, like mega cap managers. So think about that as Apollo, Blackstone, Blue Owl is kind of a new entrant. And it's typically shorter duration credit products. So it's like private credit is probably the like most exciting thing.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  It's why Blackstone paid $12 billion, or sorry, BlackRock paid $12 billion for HPS, a similar amount for GIP, Global Infrastructure Partners, because retail wants alternatives and alternatives are a higher fee stream and, you know, can provide like kind of returns that you couldn't necessarily get in the, in the public markets. So, or in, in public fixed income. But it's not necessarily been venture. It's been, you know, mostly private credit or infrastructure or real estate. So BREIT, Bcred, things like that.

• 16:06Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I think the tech community is a little skewed to thinking that venture is the biggest asset class because they've got the loudest mouths. But in all reality, it's only like one to $2 trillion. Like I've worked for asset managers before that are one to $2 trillion AUMs, which is really, really funny in the grand scheme of things.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like our biggest client has more AUM than the entire venture industry deployed over the last two years.

• 16:32Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  And they're an RIA.

• 16:34Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. So how does that make you think of that industry?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  I think that it shows how much money there actually is out there. There's an unbelievable amount of money out there and. It's gonna present an interesting opportunity, as I said. It's gonna open up Pandora's box to what potentially happens when different managers figure out how to penetrate it. I think there's gonna be a lot of upside, but I think there's also gonna be a lot of potential downside.

• 17:02Molly O'Shea?

  Because there's so many different kinds of financial products that you're offering, is personalization for RIA is now table stakes?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  It's not. I wish it was table stakes. It's gonna become table stakes. It's gonna have to become table stakes. The challenge is, most platforms can't actually support it. Personalization is one of those things that everyone says they do, but they don't actually do it.

• 17:23Molly O'Shea?

  Why do you mean?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  It's kind of like, like the example I like to use is like self-driving cars, right? And everyone has like cruise control, right? And personalization today is cruise control for most people, in at least the way they say it, whereas like Viz is like full self, Tesla full self-driving, right? Is it absolutely perfect? No, but will it be? Over time, yes, it will be. And like everyone else needs to be at full self-driving, which means understanding each client as an individual and like all their individual needs within the context of a broader strategy. And most firms today just think about the broader strategy and they don't manage each client and all of their individual nuanced needs.

• 18:03Molly O'Shea?

  So I last saw you in London and you have global exposure here. So I wanna get your perspective on how wealth is shifting globally.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  So the reason why I'm starting to build a global network, and I have been for the last couple of years, I'm not sure if you've read Changing World Orders by Ray Dalio.

• 18:22Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Great book.

• 18:23Molly O'Shea?

  Of course.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  I don't know. I want the US to win. I really deeply do. But I think the wealth is going to spread and I think there are places like India or Southeast Asia that are growing incredibly fast. And if you wanna build a truly global wealth business, you need to think about all these other markets that are even more fragmented than the markets in the US. So I'm starting to think about, you know, how the rise of wealth in other places is going to impact the global wealth business, because it will. Like we are now living in a globalized society, so all businesses need to think with some degree of a global lens.

• 19:03Molly O'Shea?

  Does Vise have clients in other countries?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Right now, we don't because the regulatory, you know, pressure is definitely different in other countries. But I think that over the next couple of years, there will be a natural expansion to all of these other places. And I think those other places will probably need it just as much, you know, as people in the US do. And there's honestly an opportunity to kind of skip a step, meaning, you know, in, in India, everyone jumped from, like, they kind of skipped credit cards and went straight to, you know, peer-to-peer payments, right? I think there's the same kind of analogous in wealth, which is, you know, people, you know, a lot of these cash-based societies are now moving digital so they can skip,

• 19:48Speaker 00

  you know, the, you know, era of crappy financial products and go straight to personalized portfolios that are entirely facilitated by technology, by algorithms, you know, we can help facilitate that.

• 20:00Molly O'Shea?

  One of the most significant points that I realized when I was in London was, I was there for a family office conference and some dinners, was that many people are leaving London and they have been for a little bit, but they're going to places like Milan and they're going to places like Dubai. How have you seen that shift? Do you have any exposure to that? Like, where is that going?

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've a lot of like, personal investments that are kind of everywhere, but I'm seeing a huge shift to Dubai, but typically by like, you know, London used to be referred to as the washing machine. So basically, like, a lot of Russian people, you know, other people from different places of parts of the world went to London to kind of hide money. It's now kind of gotten harder to do that. The domicile, like, you know, the tax situation's not been great. So now they're realizing they can't really do that very well in London. So they're moving to Dubai. So Dubai is now the hot place for everyone to move. It's the same thing in Hong Kong. Everyone's moving money from out of Hong Kong into Singapore. So you see, like, everyone is trying to chase these, like, shelters for capital.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And it presents some interesting opportunities from a wealth management perspective. But at the same time, it also presents a bunch of like KYC concerns and, you know, who are you actually managing money on behalf of and things like that? So I think companies that are going to go into those markets and think about that as an opportunity have to be really careful because you don't know where all that money leads back to.

• 21:32Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, you don't. Does that mostly come down to taxes?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  It does come down to taxes, but it also comes down to, you know, there's a lot of people that do money laundering and, you know, some, some, some bad things and they end up in those places like, you know, Dubai.

• 21:48Molly O'Shea?

  Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20x the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one.

• 22:29Molly O'Shea?

  With same-day and even same-hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid, trust and use Brex.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery.

• 22:50Molly O'Shea?

  Well, part of your announcement on Twitter had to do with taxes, so I'm going to read this. You said that you've created over $63 million in tax savings for your clients and saved over 200K hours for 100 firms on behalf of 30,000 accounts. So how are you helping your clients with tax savings?

• 23:10Speaker 00

  So that's through tax loss harvesting. So this is something that most people miss. When you buy an index fund or a whole basket of different ETFs, you might see if the one ETF is up or down at the end of the year and you'll offset your loss with a potential gain and then buy a new index fund later and you have to do this manually, but you can, you know, basically harvest your losses and offset. With your gains, the thing that most people miss is, you know, one, people are either not doing this, most of the time, people are not doing this, or if they are doing it, they're doing it manually, usually on top of an ETF or some kind of fund wrapper. The real opportunity is can you buy a basket of indexes or basket of underlying securities

• 23:52Speaker 00

  that represent in an index, that represent that S and P 500 ETF. And then within that index, you can, when there's volatility, so let's say Nvidia is up and Apple is down, you can sell your Apple position and offset it with your gain in Nvidia and create a tax loss. So your total gain at the end of the year will be less because you have this loss, but your, your performance will be the same as if you had the index on your own. So it's, it's this opportunity to basically, we call it daily tax loss harvesting, but every single day, we're looking for opportunities to offset losses with gains. So you can minimize your tax bill at the end of the year. And it's highly algorithmic. So we have algorithms that are looking at thousands and thousands of client accounts every single day, looking for

• 24:37Speaker 00

  these opportunities. And it allows you to maintain your performance of the index while basically saving a bunch of money in taxes. And I think the number is probably higher than that at this point. But what's exciting is we can do that for clients of any scale. So before you could only really do that, you'd, you'd hire what was referred to as a separately managed account provider. There are companies that did this. They've been around for a long time and they have a human portfolio manager that's looking, you know, a couple of times a week, a couple of times a month to taxless harvest, not looking every single day. And it's usually only for client accounts that are kind of well over a million dollars. We can do this for client accounts that are kind of $10,000, which means that functionally,

• 25:19Speaker 00

  you're kind of bridging the wealth access gap. How do you give the same advice, the same advantages the ultra wealthy had to everyone and giving everyone an even better offering because technology is able to drive a better overall outcome?

• 25:35Molly O'Shea?

  I have so many questions on this. First, like, what is the range of clients that you have? Like, where does the band go till?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  So we've got clients that are well in excess of like, you know, we've got billionaire clients, but they've got individual accounts well in excess of $150 million on our platform. And then we've got client accounts that I kid you not are $200, like really, really small. Like, we want to be able to service. All clients, we kind of have this principle of like, meet the client where they are. We want to be able to service all clients, all different types of accounts across all asset classes. And it's a really interesting problem because the problem can only be solved with technology. Because if you threw humans at this problem and said, hey, I want you to figure out asset allocation for a $10,000 account or $100 million account, you know, you would throw,

• 26:22Speaker 00

  you know, a ton of resources at the $100 million account and very few resources at the $10,000 account. And, you know, we think that all accounts should be functionally treated the same.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  In today's high-speed business world, staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges, no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit turing.com/sourcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's turing.com/sourcery.

• 27:09Molly O'Shea?

  Besides taxes and also portfolio adjustments, how is Viz optimizing portfolios for your clients?

• 27:16Speaker 00

  So we're looking at the specific persona of the client, meaning, so let's say you are a good example, right? Let's say you really care about, you know, let's say you want to do a PhD program at some point, or you want to do like a master's degree. I don't think you will, but. And that master's degree costs, I don't know, $300,000. So you want, and you're earlier on in your investing journey, and you want to slowly over time pay for that big kind of liability. You're probably going to want to transition your portfolio from equities to more fixed income, so you have a stable income stream to be able to make those payments to cover that, you know, big fancy expense, or buy a home, whatever it might be.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  So you're going to have a different need out of your asset allocation, out of your portfolio than, say, someone who doesn't plan to spend any money, who should just be entirely in. Equities or entirely in or someone who's looking to retire and they want to be you know, a little less weighted towards equity and more in fixed income because they want to meet their kind of fixed income, you know, retirement target. They want to have a certain amount of income every single year that can kind of help pay for their lifestyle. And they don't want to take on a lot of risk because they don't have a necessarily need for more and more capital. They just want to be able to cover their income needs. So every client is different from an asset allocation perspective, from their goals perspective, and that should be kind of mapped towards in their portfolio. Then you've got kind

• 28:40Speaker 00

  of a lower level needs, which is imagine you work in tech. Imagine you work at Apple or Airbnb or some private tech company that's going public or a big public company and you have a lot of stock. You are one, you know, you have risk in that sector. So in technology, you know, if you hold Apple stock because you work there, you have risk in the technology sector. If you get, if the technology sector takes a hit, you could get let go, you could see a pay decrease, you could see any number of things that happen. So like we saw this in COVID, a lot of folks that worked in the airline industry had a lot of airline stock and they got furloughed or they got laid off and they got hit in both places. So if I were that person with that portfolio, I would have less tech exposure.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  So I would rebuild my index with less technology to account for the returns that Apple position is supposed to make up for. And then I would, you know, wait overall like less to companies that are correlated with that particular company. So if anything happens, I'm not necessarily my kind of investment portfolios, my investment returns are protected from the risks I have as a person working in technology with a concentrated Apple stock position. Then it gets into a second level of nuance, which is you have this Apple position, but you want to start to transition out of it over time. And, you know, because you've held on to it for so long, you've got a lot of embedded gains. Back to that taxless harvesting concept we just talked about, we're going to start to create losses in the portfolio

• 30:06Speaker 00

  to offset the gains. So imagine we're creating a little bit, some losses in your portfolio every single day and we're selling down a little bit of Apple every single day. So over a 10, 12, 15 year period, whatever the period might be, you can create enough losses to offset the whole collective gain of that Apple position and transition that Apple position into a broad-based diversified index without having to pay a huge tax bill, depending on how long you're willing to wait to get out of that Apple position into the broad-based diversified index. Sorry if it was a little complicated.

• 30:37Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, no, it wasn't. So helpful. Okay, now, the next scenario is you're Elon Musk or you're Mark Zuckerberg. Why do you have zero salary?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  That's a whole other, I mean, they don't really technically have zero salary. They, it's tax inefficient to have a sal, like, if I'm making, like, I don't really pay myself a ton of money. Because I'm like, why would I, like, what, what do you, you're paying a crazy amount of taxes on income. It's like, you can't necessarily offset capital losses with, with income. So like, if I generate a bunch of losses in my stock portfolio, then, and I make a million dollars in salary, I can't take those losses and pay a less tax bill on my salary. The, your deduction limit is $3,000 on your salary. So it's very tax inefficient to just get a paycheck, you know, every single, you know, every, every two weeks, right? It's extremely tax efficient.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  What's more tax efficient is you get stock. So if Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or any of these people got a bunch of stock, and then they put that into their portfolio. And then with that stock in their portfolio, you can do all kinds of fun things. You can take loans against that stock. You can run a buffer strategy. So you basically can, you know, collar that stock with options. So collaring a stock basically means you'll go short and long that stock. Um, so you basically net out the market. And then you, uh, take a loan against that stock. Um, and then you just keep kind of repaying the principal on the loan. Um, and then you've functionally got a pretty clean way to avoid taxes in perpetuity. Um, as long as the, uh, you know, as long as you can kind of keep paying the interest,

• 32:12Speaker 00

  which a lot of these CEOs tend to do. So it's a long story of saying that salaries are, are tax inefficient. If you are creative with stock, you can, you know, cover enough of your cash flow needs from, you know, collaring a certain portion of the stock or taking loans against the stock. Um, and it's overarching, you know, a, a much more efficient strategy.

• 32:37Molly O'Shea?

  So the properties, the real estate, that's usually based on loans off of stock, if you would imagine?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  So a lot of things that people miss, so like, when you read those stories of like, I'm sure you've read a bunch of them of like, blah, blah, blah, tech billionaire buys $50 million house, or $100 million house, all cash paid. They're not paying in all cash. What they're doing is they're going to their You know, guy at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs and they're saying, hey, let me get a loan against my shares in blank company. And they're going to, you know, pull a loan against that shares. It's usually a margin loan on the portfolio. And then they're going to use that to finance or purchase the house.

• 33:16Molly O'Shea?

  Got it. And then what about the private jets?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  That's a whole other, like, that's, I mean, there's all kinds of different ways people finance these things. It's a little different. Most of the time, most of these people don't own the planes. The companies own the planes. They are, they're deducts. If you buy a new plane, I don't know what the tax rules on this are quite yet, but if you buy a new plane, you can depreciate a certain amount of that plane and offset it with gains in your, you know, public's portfolio or your, your private silicon portfolio. And then what a lot of GPs do, or a lot of managers do is they actually expense these planes or the operating costs from their fund, which is, I feel like a complete scam.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  But you can basically deduct the cost of operating an aircraft from the actual fund, which will impact your IRR to some degree. It doesn't even come out of the management company. And, you know, voila, you can fly private.

• 34:15Molly O'Shea?

  So I want to shift a little bit more back to the venture capital scope of things. Most of the audience is in the VC world. I was recently at a conference in Monaco for family offices and we were talking about exit lockups, specifically in venture capital and the lack of IPOs. How are managers and RIAs thinking about dealing with their locked up capital from all these tech companies?

• 34:43Speaker 00

  So most RIAs aren't in these tech companies. So they don't really have to think about it.

• 34:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  And they're now just getting into it for the first time. It's kind of a new concept for them. But it presents an interesting challenge because their clients can't have these lockups like most of these long-term LPs have had, because most clients at some point have cash flow needs at a shorter duration than a foundation or endowment would. They can't hold on to an illiquid position forever. They want to go buy their vacation house or send their kid to college, or whatever it might be. So that's going to provide, present a really interesting challenge. What the solution to it at the end of the day is like a secondary marketplace. And no one really, I think this is part of the Carda X vision, but no one has really built a strong, broad, secondary marketplace. And

• 35:32Speaker 00

  I think in order for this problem to be solved, and in order to get more illiquid, long-term positions into a client's portfolio, it needs to be through a robust secondary marketplace. And we don't have one yet. The other thing I'm starting to see is, it's unlikely that that liquidity problem is going to be solved anytime soon. And the only reason why is because if I'm a private company, which actually I am, I don't necessarily want my stock valued every single day. Because it can kind of present a little bit of a distraction if you're a long-term thinker, which is like companies that are thinking on really long time horizons, want their team, want their investors, they want them to project all their growth as far out into the future as possible, so they can build towards the biggest

• 36:17Speaker 00

  possible outcome, versus people that are thinking about their stock price every single day are focused on the here and now, not as much in the, you know, way distant future, where all the value or innovation value is going to really come to play, come to fruition. So I think that it's a long way of saying that more companies are going to stay private for longer.

• 36:42Molly O'Shea?

  Surprise, surprise.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And there needs a secondary marketplace that can support it.

• 36:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, yeah, we're definitely seeing that. In terms of family offices themselves, I'm sure they look and act similar to RIAs. Are you seeing them act like mini RIAs?

• 36:57Speaker 00

  So a lot of family offices that are sophisticated on investments are becoming multifamily offices, and multifamily offices are just RIAs. So they're becoming RIAs. They're saying, hey, we've built all these, this investment acumen. We want to now share it with our friends. So then they bring all their friends on and they create this multifamily office. And they create an investment team that supports that. Most single family offices up until a certain scale, so like if you're Bernard Arnault, you probably have your own investment team. But if you are a run-of-the-mill billionaire, you don't necessarily do your investments in-house. Because if you have your own in-house CIO, you have your own in-house investment team, you are exposing that person to all of your dirty laundry that you might not want to.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  So you're typically outsourcing, at least what I'm seeing is that most single family offices that have clients with a few billion bucks are typically outsourcing the actual core investment management to an RIA firm. So there's ultra-high-net-worth-focused RIA firms. So we have a client, New Edge, for example. They manage, you know, a lot of money. And New Edge, a lot of their business is managing, you know, billions of dollars on behalf of family offices as the outsourced or OCIO. And we are, then we support them on the backend. If you get to a certain scale, these firms end up potentially becoming, you know, integrated and, you know, they actually do the investments in-house. But it actually makes more sense to outsource.

• 38:24Molly O'Shea?

  Got it. Shifting over to Viz. Let's now get into Viz's growth. Like we mentioned earlier, over 15 billion in platform assets. That's pretty tremendous. I know it's been eight years, but like, that's, that's a big accomplishment. So congrats.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 38:41Molly O'Shea?

  In terms of your funding history, I'd love to break that down. So how has that evolved over time? I know you raised a lot of money early on. But what was the fundraising process like for you?

• 38:52Speaker 00

  I mean, it wasn't that early on. I was already like four or five years into the business before we raised our seed round. So Keith Rabois led our like our first seed round with this guy Ben Ling. And it was at like a $4 million valuation. I was like.

• 39:05Molly O'Shea?

  But how old were you at the time?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  I was 19.

• 39:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Or no, I was 18. I was 18 when they were invested.

• 39:09Molly O'Shea?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Um, but I started the business when I was 15. So like, what is that? That's like, you know, three, four years almost before I raised my seed round that I was like bootstrapping the thing. Just like sleeping on couches and floors in the Bay Area. Um, so it took a long time and I tried to raise money earlier and no one would give me money. They're like, what business does this like 16 year old kid have building software for financial advisors? And honestly, I come to think about it, I'm like, kind of weird. Why was I building software for financial advisors when I was 16? But I was able to kind of figure out how to raise money and tell the story. Um, coinciding with a great market, um, pretty quickly. So we went from seed to unicorn in like 18 months, which was kind of insane. Now it's happened a couple of times with, you know, these AI companies.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  But at the time it was kind of unheard of, especially for one company to raise continuous back to back financing rounds from Sequoia. Um, so it was, it was, it was pretty cool at the time. The challenge was, if I reflect on it, we either raised too much money or we raised too little money. And the reason why I say that is when you raise a lot of money, it burns a hole in your pocket. Cause you're like, how do I spend this money? And the way you think of spending money is you want to grow faster. Every VC says you need to grow faster. So the way you think you're going to grow faster is you go out and hire a bunch of people. But then when you hire a bunch of people, all those people, you know, come with problems and baggage. And like more people you hire, the bigger your people team needs to be, the bigger your recruiting team needs to be, the bigger your legal team needs to be, the bigger your operations team needs to be.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  And then over time, you start to build a lot of bloat really quickly. And if you overlay this of being in a world where you're remote. And you don't really know the people you're working with because there's a global pandemic happening. You really quickly build a pretty bad culture because it's hard to build relationships with people. It's hard to build culture over Zoom. People can debate it, but like all these remote companies are now going back into office. I'm a strong believer of the office. Too capital is free. So you've got all of these companies that are raising a ton of money. So if employees are upset with you, they just leave. So you're trying to make all these employees really happy so they don't leave your company. But like the reality is the decision that makes someone happy is usually the wrong decision for the business.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  So there's all of these things that happened at that particular time in the world that no longer exists today that we just kind of had to go through. But like, looking back, we just hired too many people. We hired too many senior people and fancy executives that we didn't need to hire. We just spent too much money and it didn't like, it ended up being more of a time suck for me than it did a contributor to the growth of the business. And, you know, it was, won't happen again, but it was a good learning. And I think everyone should kind of reflect on some of those learnings that I had and other, other folks had during that kind of bull market period for when the next bull market comes, or if they're an AI company in the, in the bull market today. And then I think the second was my point around raising not enough money was if the markets were good enough and the

• 42:05Speaker 00

  price was good enough, if you raise a lot of money, you can go buy a company that has a lot of distribution. And for a long time Silicon Valley was very against acquiring companies. They thought that organic growth was the only way you should scale a company. And I think it's some industries, if you look at financial services in particular, BlackRock, Blackstone, you know, most of these RIA businesses, they've all grown, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, they've all gone, grown, grown through M and A. They've all just acquired all the like smaller firms and, you know, drove efficiencies through those firms and, you know, gotten benefits of scale.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  I think there was a tremendous opportunity to buy kind of legacy asset management businesses that had a tremendous amount of distribution and transform them with technology that we could have done if we had raised a lot more money, rather than going and hiring a bunch of people and trying to grow purely organically, that we probably just, you know, probably should have done, but you know, it's hindsight's 2020.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Love premium merch just as much as we do? That's why Sorcery uses Fourth Wall. Everyone from creators like Marcus Brownlee to podcasts like Acquire to orgs like the Smithsonian Institute are using Fourth Wall. They let you create and sell premium products without having to stress the details. They handle everything from production, shipping, customer support, taxes, even giveaways. When it's time to level up and make gear that people are actually proud to wear, that's when it's time to use Fourth Wall. And that's why we've trusted Fourth Wall for all of our brand wear at Sorcery since day one. Use my link in the description to get free credits for your first order. And for any VCs, DM me on X and I can get all your portfolio companies set up with a free samples credit deal.

• 43:50Molly O'Shea?

  I definitely want to go right to the M&A point that you just mentioned. Are you thinking about that at all for the future? Like, what are your aspirations, your vision for how big Viz will get?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  We want to build the world's largest asset manager entirely powered by a technology platform. So if you think about most asset managers today, they are product companies. They're building a mutual fund or an ETF and they're distributing that product. And it's a human distributing that product and a human building that product, whether it's a human portfolio manager or it's a salesperson and they're taking it to a financial advisor who are distributing it, or you know, they're going to the end clients who are purchasing it. Our belief is that all advice should be received through a platform that is personalized to any client in nature across all asset classes. So whatever asset class will both kind of most help the end client get to their kind

• 44:41Speaker 00

  of, call it financial freedom, most helpful to get to their end financial goal. And technology, algorithms should be the primary, you know, mechanism to receiving that advice. And today, the asset management industry doesn't work that way, but there needs to be one platform that is functionally the platform that powers the global multi-trillion dollar asset management industry.

• 45:03Molly O'Shea?

  And it will be Viz.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  And it will be Viz, partially because... Unless there's someone else, part of the bet is because I'm 24 years old, right? I can go work on this for the next two or three decades and still be like a considerably young person.

• 45:18Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Whereas the CEOs of most of these big asset management firms, or most of these big kind of institutions that control a lot of capital are just really old and naturally they're gonna have to retire. And when they retire, they're gonna pass it along to the next generation that, you know, they didn't necessarily build these businesses and you know what they say about the second and third generations. So ideally, we have an opportunity of building a better product, capturing distribution, and just letting the thing compound with time.

• 45:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's excellent. And I do wanna dig in a little bit more into the team. When I read one of your fundraising announcements, I think it might have been your Series C or something like that, you had 70 employees at the time. And in your latest tweet, you said you had 41. So you're scaling back, you're concentrating, you're going after the barrel approach that Keith Rabois talks about a lot. In terms of your perspective, like, at what point do you stop scaling the team? Like, what makes up the current team?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  So, I only want to hire people if we absolutely have to hire them. Like, it doesn't make sense. Sometimes what the incentives of a manager... So we actually scaled the company to like 150 people or something crazy.

• 46:30Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  So it was way more than 70 people. But we hired a lot of managers, like senior executives, people that had come from companies like Meta or Dropbox or others, where they'd been used to having 100, 200, 300-person organizations. And if you look at any of their LinkedIn's, their LinkedIn's are gonna say, "Scaled an organization from 20 people to 200 people." And like, people think, associate their identities with how big of an organization they have, or how big of an org they were able to scale, and over what time. So there's this natural incentive of, in order for me to move up in the organization and to be able to prove my worth to people, I need to hire a lot of people. So when you hire these people, they go and they hire all of these people. And you know, when you're young, you don't really know any better. And you think, okay, well,

• 47:14Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I'll do that, of course.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  It sounds, it sounds like a good idea. And our realization was there are a set of people in the organization in different roles. So like, we found a client service person who was really, really smart and now like leads our entire enterprise business. Um, or different engineers that might not have this most senior pedigree backgrounds, but like they're the ones in the office super late that are solving our most important, difficult problems. I just couldn't have predicted them. And those people, those, you know, as Keith calls them, the barrels, um, are the ones that move the organization forward. And once, when we realized that and we identified those people, it was like, how can we find more of these people? And how can we put those barrels in positions of power? And like all of these other people that are just hiring a lot of people and they're delegating and they're kind of, you know,

• 47:58Speaker 00

  not necessarily in the details at every single level. I was just like, find them another place and transition them out of Viz into a place where, where that is, you know, maybe a big tech company or, you know, asset management firm where that is more culturally set up.

• 48:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly love how open and honest you are about the lessons that you've learned along the way. It's like, most founders don't really want to share all of this stuff, but I think it's like, it's very commendable.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, a lot of, thank you. A lot of people gave me advice. They tried to like, so I kind of just want to push it forward, play it forward. But I think the biggest reason, like I wrote this blog post, probably a year after we did all these like cuts and resets called refounding Viz. And the reason why I did it was because I would talk to a lot of founders that all made the same sets of mistakes. And they would say like, I'm too scared to like, you know, fire these executives. Or I'm too scared to like, reset my team or do anything else. And like, the lesson I want people to take away from Viz was we did it and we were better off for it. And it was like so amazing and successful. And yes, it was hard for the two months we did it, but like, we just, You know, we actually turned it into something that made the overall organization

• 49:13Speaker 00

  much better. So like, you shouldn't be scared. And I'm a good example you can point to of like, things working out and being okay. So that was kind of the primary motivation.

• 49:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Well, performance does seem like one of your biggest values, especially with the company and being efficient.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:31Molly O'Shea?

  So, we're very lucky to be sponsored by Brex, and Brex is all about performance, spending smarter and moving faster. I'm curious to learn from you, within all of that, how did you manage scale and burn?

• 49:46Speaker 00

  I, for a while, was not in the details on burn. I mean, one of our investors had told us, just burn whatever money you have to. Like, who cares? Like, when you're early stage, and a very well-known, very recognizable investor, burn whatever money you have to, just hire whoever you need to, like, go, go, go, that's all that matters. And their incentive, like, one of the core principles I start to think about is like, you know, you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, famous Charlie Munger quote. But I'm thinking about everyone's incentives and everything they say, which is, an investor's incentive is to get you to burn money, because they believe it'll help you grow faster. And if it grows faster, then you can always raise more money and burn more money, and they can put more money in for you to burn, so they can deploy more capital that they can

• 50:27Speaker 00

  charge more fees on, and they can own more of your company. But your incentive is, how do you build, you know, the best possible, fastest-growing, efficient business that you own as much as possible, you and your team own as much of? And I think that's just a direct contradiction to most investors. So I think it's, one, being mindful of the incentives of who's giving you the advice around managing your capital. And then, two, is understanding what are the incentives of your team. So as I talked about people wanting to hire more people, they're not necessarily thinking about the financial implications. So when an engineering leader says, I want to hire 100 engineers, because like, that's just what I want to do, and like, that's what you promised me I could go do, or that's what I had at my previous company, that's what I needed to be successful, they're just thinking about hiring 100 engineers. They're not thinking about the cost associated with

• 51:11Speaker 00

  hiring 100 engineers. And like, what the second order implications are on dilution, and, you know, having to go raise more capital, or opportunity cost of capital. Any of these other things. So it's important that you're thinking about your incentives, their incentives, everyone else's incentives, you know, before you even think about like, what is your kind of financial plan? So that's like step one. Step two is starting to think about, okay, well, what do I actually think I'm going to be able to do with this capital? And how do I efficiently grow? So you should build as early on as possible, a, you know, kind of a complex, not, it doesn't have to be too complex, but a financial model of your business. And one, this business, this model will help you understand how you're thinking about the different levers of your business, your, you know, how many calls you need to make

• 51:55Speaker 00

  in order to convert how many customers. And you can do it based on kind of high level data points from your own experience. But, you know, how do you think about your business? And all the different nuances of your business and the input metrics into your business that will lead to some end output being revenue and profits and growth. And then based on that, you can understand at a high level, what, how much capital do you need to deploy in order to, you know, kind of make progress in your input metrics with some kind of margin of safety. And then from there, you can kind of forecast what your burn needs to look like. I don't know if that makes sense.

• 52:29Molly O'Shea?

  Makes sense. But it does, it seems like you had to learn a lot on your own and not really rely on your investors for much. I'm really curious, in your mind, who are finance leaders that you admire most? And like, who do you look for, for advice? Like, how did you navigate all of this on your own?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, as you shouted out Brex, I mean, I think Michael Tannenbaum at Brex, he was like their long time CFO, was absolutely incredible. And he's got a lot of like deep, in-depth financial understanding. I mean, I think Enrique was an incredible fundraiser, and he was great at kind of understanding some of these things. I think they made some of the same mistakes early on, but, you know, they learned from it as well. I think Pedro's been doing a great job with that. So I think all of those people, all of those folks have kind of learned a lot from, in that, in that sense. But I think more importantly, it's just kind of thinking about problems from a first principles standpoint of like, what do I actually need to do something? Like, how many people do I actually need? Like, if I'm, if you're like putting a gun to my head and saying, how many engineers do I actually need to build this product? How many salespeople do I actually need to go out and sell it?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  And how much work are they actually doing? You can be a little bit more sober about what you really need versus what you want to have versus what you think is cool because it's fun to have a lot of people, at least you think it is.

• 53:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Well, as we wrap up, I like to close with two segments on future outlooks. Number one, what are you most looking forward to this year?

• 53:55Speaker 00

  You know, I wrote a bunch of predictions early on in the year.

• 53:58Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  And I'm just looking forward to seeing how many of them I become like I'm right on versus not.

• 54:06Molly O'Shea?

  Any examples?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  I'll give you a bunch of examples. So the first example I had was at the beginning of the year, I said there's going to be some kind of natural disaster or wildfire and it was going to have an impact on the insurance markets. And two weeks later, there's breakout wildfires in California. The second was, I said Doge was going to be somewhat of a failure. And I want it to be a success. I think it's really important, but you know, I don't necessarily know if it's turned out how everyone kind of pitched it to turn out. And that a lot of Silicon Valley would unfortunately turn out of the administration because they realized how tough politics is. So I think that's like starting to happen. Another prediction I had was like there would be huge breakthroughs in quantum computing. And like, it seems like there's been some pretty big breakthroughs in quantum computing.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  So I think there's like a bunch of different, a whole bunch of different dimensions of like just kind of viewpoints on the world I had. And I'm just curious to see which of them come to fruition versus which don't.

• 55:01Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, fair. Well, to top that off, we're going to bring in some Kalshi predictions and really put your money where your mouth is.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, okay. So let me pull them up.

• 55:12Molly O'Shea?

  These ones all have to do with wealth. Surprise, surprise. Wealth and technology. Okay, so, Samir, do you think a recession is gonna happen this year?

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Um, if it's not this year, it would be late, like Q3, Q4. Uh, it'll probably be early next year.

• 55:30Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the current odds are on that?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I would say 60% chance of a recession. 60 cents.

• 55:37Molly O'Shea?

  Not at all, no.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry, that's what my odds are.

• 55:40Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, that's your odds.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  What the current odds are, probably 22 cents.

• 55:44Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Is that on, is it closer?

• 55:46Molly O'Shea?

  I think it, I think it just dropped below 30.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. In terms of the wealthiest person in the world this year, who do you think it's gonna be?

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Elon Musk.

• 55:59Molly O'Shea?

  You think Elon Musk is gonna be the wealthiest person?

• 56:01Speaker 00

  I think so, because SpaceX is probably gonna do a new tender, and he's gonna be really rich from that.

• 56:06Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, that's a good answer.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  What is it, what's the answer?

• 56:08Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I mean, we have to see, it's not the end of the year yet.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Well, or, sorry, what is the Kalshi prediction?

• 56:13Molly O'Shea?

  Uh, Elon Musk, of course. And, oh, this is a really interesting one.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Actually, I changed my answer. I think the wealthiest person in the world is actually Putin, but...

• 56:22Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Yes. But disclosed wealthiest person in the world, sure, Elon Musk.

• 56:28Molly O'Shea?

  What do you know?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Plenty.

• 56:31Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 56:35Molly O'Shea?

  This one is really interesting. Who will join Trump's sovereign wealth fund before 2027?

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Who will join it?

• 56:43Molly O'Shea?

  These are like finance leaders.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Probably some like big investment banking, like, uh, I mean, wasn't Michael Grimes supposed to join it? Um...

• 56:53Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. Chamath.

• 56:59Molly O'Shea?

  Good answer. He's in the running.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:04Molly O'Shea?

  Um, and then, from your perspective, as someone who's really focused on AI and optimizing your own company, what do you think the best AI will be this month?

• 57:13Speaker 00

  Deep seek.

• 57:16Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. That's a good answer. I don't even see it on this one. Right now it has Gemini.

• 57:23Molly O'Shea?

  No. I think it's OpenAI. OpenAI? Of those. Okay. Well, these are all good answers. I appreciate that and your predictions. Samir, it was awesome to have you on. Thank you so much for taking the time and being my own personal financial advisor for today. I hope it wasn't too complicated, but I had a fun time. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter sorcery dot VC, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.