How a Solo Founder is Reshaping Global Finance (Parth Garg, CEO of Aspora)

In the summer of 2022, Parth Garg woke up in Bangalore to discover that his co-founder had fled the country and emailed their investors to tell them their company was dead. Just over three years later, Aspora is one of fintech’s fastest-growing startups. The company, which makes it faster and cheaper for India’s diaspora to send money home and access banking services, now processes close to half a billion dollars in volume every month and has earned a $500 million valuation with backing from elite investors like Hummingbird Ventures, Sequoia, and Greylock. In this conversation, Parth shares his journey from physics prodigy to fintech founder, offering insights into what it really takes to build resilience as a founder and how to create a culture where feedback flows freely, even without a co-founder to provide checks and balances. — We explore: • The moment when Parth discovered his co-founder had left the country and told investors the company was shutting down • How Parth’s childhood moving between cities in India and later to the UAE shaped his adaptability and entrepreneurial mindset • His journey from physics prodigy to startup founder, including early ventures before Aspora • The process of discovering product-market fit through structured experimentation after the initial business model failed • Why the Indian diaspora represents a massive, underserved financial opportunity (1% of the population contributing 30% of deposits) • How stablecoins dramatically reduced Aspora’s working capital requirements and transformed their business model • The regulatory landscape for fintech and crypto in India and the impact of the GENIUS Act in the US • Aspora’s vision to become a comprehensive cross-border bank serving multiple diaspora communities globally — Thank you to the partners who make this possible GoFundMe Giving Funds https://www.gofundme.com/mario: One Account. Zero Hassle. Guru https://www.getguru.com/: The AI source of truth for work. Persona https://withpersona.com/generalist: Trusted identity verification for any use case. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (03:53) How Parth felt when his co-founder fled the country (07:04) Parth’s early days in India and the UAE (09:37) Parth’s love of physics and competitiveness (12:15) The not-so-straightforward path from studying physics at Stanford to entrepreneurship (14:13) Parth’s physics heroes (16:24) The gap year that sparked Parth’s entrepreneurship journey (18:36) Parth’s first startup: selling near-expired groceries (21:58) Moving back to the United States and founding Vance (28:00) Joining YC and finding early backers (31:14) How Parth realized Vance needed to pivot (35:22) How Parth moved forward after his co-founder fled (37:37) Building psychological safety and open debate at Aspora (40:15) How conversations with immigrants inspired Aspora’s idea (45:13) How stablecoins solved Aspora’s biggest operational challenges (46:57) Aspora’s current scale and why India was the perfect starting point (51:34) How Aspora builds loyalty in a low-switching-cost market (52:42) The GENIUS Act and the real opportunity in stablecoins (55:52) The evolution of crypto and stablecoins in India (56:50) The importance of partnerships for scaling Aspora in India (58:18) The next phases of Aspora’s growth (01:00:04) The role of Aspora’s new bets team (1:01:20) Final meditations — Follow Parth Garg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parth29 — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/banking-the-diaspora-parth-garg — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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

• 0:00Mario Gabriele?

  You wake up one morning in Bangalore and discover that your co-founder has left the company, left the country, and you're suddenly having to deal with this all yourself.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  He's not in his room. His room is all packed up. 4 a.m. He left. He went to the airport, took a flight to SF, and from the airport, he'd messaged our investors that says, "We're deciding to shut the company down and we'll return the capital."

• 0:18Mario Gabriele?

  I think a lot of the times, folks from the outside see these incredible company stories, and they don't realize that almost all of them have at least one moment or two like this, where things can go the other way so easily. I'm curious how you think about, are you built to be a solo founder? Was that actually the right path for you?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone should be a solo founder. It's just easier when you have people around you that are in the same boat as you, because as the company scales, your employees start taking up functions, you hire over them, and the company grows, and there's no one next to you. It becomes quite lonely.

• 0:51Mario Gabriele?

  In the summer of 2022, Parth Garg woke up in Bangalore to discover that his co-founder had fled the country and emailed their investors to tell them that their company was dead. A little over three years later, and Aspora is now one of fintech's fastest-growing startups. The company, which makes it faster and cheaper for India's diaspora to send money home and access banking services, is now processing over half a billion dollars every month and has earned a $500 million valuation with backing from elite investors like Hummingbird, Sequoia, and Greylock. Today, Parth and I discuss how stable coins have revolutionized the financial system, why India's diaspora is such a valuable market to target,

• 1:34Mario Gabriele?

  and what it really takes to survive the dark moments of building a transformative company. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. I'm really excited to have today's episode brought to you by GoFundMe Giving Funds. I want to tell you about a new product GoFundMe has launched called Giving Funds, a smarter, easier way to give, especially during tax season, which is basically already here. GoFundMe Giving Funds is the DAF, or Donor Advised Fund, from the world's number one giving platform, trusted by 200 million people. Make a tax-deductible donation to over 1.4 million nonprofits with zero admin or asset fees.

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• 2:58Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:40Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:58Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Mario.

• 3:59Mario Gabriele?

  I think you are building one of the most interesting and exciting companies in the world. So we're going to talk a lot about Aspor, about stable coins, about India. But I want to sort of start with what I imagine would be one of the hardest parts of this journey and maybe sort of figure out how you got there and how you got out of it, which was in summer of 2022, you are the founder of a company at this point, and you wake up one morning in Bangalore, I think, and discover that your co-founder has left the company, left the country, and you're suddenly... Having to deal with this all yourself, like take, take, take us back to that moment, maybe and, and how that felt.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  We actually ended the previous night on a pretty heated argument.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  We both realized that the idea that we were initially working on is not going to scale. It's not the right idea to work on. We told this to our investors, we bought time to figure out what to do next. And obviously it was very stressful. He wanted to take a completely different direction. He wanted us to move back to the US, build something in enterprise. We were still figuring it out. I wanted to continue doing fintech. I wanted to stay in India. And the biggest problem was we were both co-CEOs. And that, that I think never works out because we're both alpha type personalities. He's fantastic. I would like to think I'm great as well. And we couldn't come to a decision. So we ended up, well, I guess, really pissed with each other going back to our rooms.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I wake up at, yes, eight AM and there's a panic text from one of our investors saying that, hey, Pat, what is going on? I'm like, what do you mean? And he forwards me a message from John that says, who's my co-founder, that says, we're deciding to shut the company down and we'll return the capital. And so I go and try to find John in the room. I don't find him. I wake a couple of my team members. We all at this point used to live together. We were like eight of us, John and I, and then six of our team members in this one house. And so we try to figure out what's going on. I can't find him. I'm trying to call him. It doesn't go through. We ended up checking the CCTV cameras, trying to figure out what happened. He's not in his room. His room is all packed up. Apparently like four AM, he left, he went to the airport, took a flight to SF.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  It's on that flight and from the airport he messaged our investors. That was, that was a pretty bad punch, yeah.

• 6:12Mario Gabriele?

  Oof, I start with that in one way, not just because, you know, not to, to try and create the drama of the moment, but because like, I think a lot of the times folks from the outside see these incredible company stories. And they don't realize that almost all of them have at least one moment or two like this where things are just insanely hard and you're, you know, maybe not always this, this close to death, but where, where things can go the other way so easily. And especially with you guys now, you know, this is now a story that feels so exciting and you've gotten to such an incredible level. And so to, to hear, you know, you, how you made it from, from that point to where you are now, I think will be a lot of fun.

• 6:54Mario Gabriele?

  But hopefully that sort of sets the scene for, for how these startups happen and. How special I think your story really is. To maybe go back a little bit, I feel like what you're building is so informed by who you are and your origins to a significant extent. Like, you know, you are in a way the customer that you're serving. So maybe we can start with that. Like, tell us about how you grew up and a little bit of your early days.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  In hindsight, I'm very glad with the way I grew up. My dad used to work for a telco company that would move him around almost every year to a different city. So I spent my first 11 years in India and within that 10 different cities, 10 different schools. Almost every year I was in a new school. I was always a new kid on the block. Had always had to be a self-taught person, had to be really good at just making friends wherever I went. And at age 11, we moved to the UAE. That was an almost alien country to me, completely different culture, a lot of nationalities. This sense of not feeling home when everyone else also does not feel home. I don't know if you know this, but 90% of the UAE is expats.

• 8:01Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, I didn't know.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And 1 in 10% belongs there, right? So everyone has identity crises of their own. It's very interesting. Another critical thing that happened is India is usually not the safest city. So parents usually don't let your kids out freely. And UAE, on the other hand, especially Abu Dhabi, is, I think, by far one of the safest cities in the world. My parents were always OK with me taking public transport, just wandering around at night, even at the age of 11. So that was very liberating. And the third thing was the school that I ended up joining when I moved there actually got founded the year that I joined it.

• 8:33Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And now it seems faithful, but I got to do a lot of culture building, a lot of tradition setting. The first batch was deciding what was the school about, right? What did we do as a student body? What activities did we do? How did we behave as a student body? So that was very exciting.

• 8:47Mario Gabriele?

  That's really interesting. It's funny to even hear someone who was a student say, like, I got to play a big role in building that culture, but it sort of shows how you maybe thought about those things. Like, when you look back on it, what were the things that were you like, actually, you know, maybe this school was a little different because of the way I.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it was just interesting things, right? Like. Uh, we were like, why can't we do student activities the other schools that just don't do? So we ended up doing, uh, actually, I think the second TED event of all of UAE in history. At my school, so we, I took the initiative, I contacted TEDx, convinced them that we want to do this, got a small budget from the school. And the school was very open to all of these things because they're like, okay, we don't have a tradition, we need to set these things. And almost every year, there's a TEDx event at our, our school. It's a one in three TEDx events that happens in the UAE. Uh, so things like that. We were just very, very fortunate.

• 9:35Mario Gabriele?

  That's really cool. I remember you telling me about this and I've, you know, since read about it and preparing for this, but your sort of early loves were, were physics, right? Like you were really a, as a young kid, watching Carl Sagan and sort of thinking about the outer universe. Like how, how did, was that just something that really naturally occurred for you?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  I think it stemmed from the fact that I had to teach myself a lot of the times. And so internet was always my primary teacher. Given that I was changing schools textbooks almost every year, um, and nothing was constant. At one point I'd given up. I was like, okay, fine. Just gonna constantly move around. I started teaching myself on the internet. And since an early age of eight or nine, really, really ended up liking, thinking about space. Uh, at one point had the naive thought of, I want to be an astronaut, but then that faded away. Then I found Carl, uh, Carl Sagan, uh, uh, found Neil, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And a bunch of other, uh, pop scientists talking about this stuff and was really fascinating. And by the time I came to grade eight, grade nine, formal physics started getting introduced and I absolutely love it. I still love math and physics quite a bit. And there was a bit of rebelliousness as well. A lot of Indian

• 10:36Speaker 01

  uh, culture is centered around you doing either medicine or engineering. And I didn't want to do either of them. Uh, so I was like, I'm gonna do pure physics, I'm gonna be a physicist. And that's what shaped high school. I ended up working with the local university. There was a, a NYU chapter in Abu Dhabi, NYU, it's a large university. I ended up getting introduced to the physics, uh, head of department there. So it's all through high school. He mentored me, coached me, I would work with him over the weekends. Um, so there was a lot of that, yeah.

• 11:03Mario Gabriele?

  So really serious in a way, like for, for that age, you really were

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 11:07Mario Gabriele?

  Pursuing it aggressively. I think every parent would be thrilled if their teenager's rebelliousness was, hey, I really want to spend a lot of time on physics. Um, that's so cool. Uh. Where does your competitiveness come from? Because that's one of my, if I think about you and knowing you at least a little bit before this, you're such a competitive person and really throughout your life, you've done a lot of things at an intense level, right? Like Olympiads, you know, this physics aspect, sport, I think also. Like, is that something that is just always?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I also smother quite a bit, right? My mom still thinks this is my biggest flaw. Two things, I am hyper competitive and I don't enjoy victories. I just move on to the next thing. My team also complains quite a bit that I don't appreciate them.

• 11:48Mario Gabriele?

  Not a celebrator?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Not, not a celebrator. But I think a part of it is also that you have some role model. And for me, that was my dad. He'd achieved quite a bit in his life from where he came from and what he ended up doing. And I always wanted to do better than him. And I saw him try multiple times. He was an entrepreneur a couple of times, failed but kept going at it. That was, I think, a large part of it. But I think it was just inherent that, that I don't like losing.

• 12:14Mario Gabriele?

  Fast forward a little bit, you, you go to Stanford and you, you go there to study physics. And the idea at that point, I think in your mind was still like, I want to be a great physicist.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I mean, my mom wanted me to study computer science because I have a small commercial and I can get a job afterwards. She was like, what are you going to do with a physics degree? No, but it was very much to become a physicist, yes.

• 12:34Mario Gabriele?

  And so what was the sort of journey from, from going in with that idea to, hey, actually, like my, my life path is going to be as a builder, as an entrepreneur?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  It was not straightforward.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  I took like the high level physics classes as a freshman, physics 60. That's the most challenging class you can take as a freshman. Was doing good. I mean, we're still struggling a bit, because everyone around you was struggling.

• 12:59Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  But I was getting through it. And I came across a couple of people, one of them who was taking directly year two classes and one of them who was taking grad classes, who was still freshmen. And they were not struggling. And I think that was sort of an understanding that there's a certain IQ level that you need to become great. And my whole idea with physics, I used to keep joking from my parents, but I wanted to be the location professor of Cambridge. And I was positioned at Isaac Newton once held and and I sort of realized that, yes, I can do good. Um, it was one more, one more incident, actually. Uh, while this was happening, I ended up working uh with uh a group called DESI. Uh, it was a dark uh energy spectrometer instrument uh group. They were doing some research on how dark energy models evolve.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And it was not groundbreaking work. It was just running some Python scripts, doing data analysis and micro optimizations on some models that someone had theorized a while ago. And I realized that a large chunk of this community, A, does not go into physics research. They all go into quant or finance. Of the ones that actually go into it, eighty percent of them do, do, don't end up doing groundbreaking work. Um, and I realized I'm not gonna make it to the top ten percent. And if that was not gonna be the case, that's not exciting.

• 14:11Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's so interesting. When you think about sort of the physicists that maybe you were most excited about or interested in, you obviously meant to mention Newton is sort of, you know, maybe uh on the, on the Mount Rushmore of, of, of that industry or that field rather. Like, were there particular people that you just found massively interesting for whatever reason?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  I was really a fanboy for Leonard Tuskin. He was, uh, I mean, he's still one of the best physicists to come out of uh twenty first century. He was a professor at Stanford. I got to see him quite a bit. Uh, I don't think he remembers me. Uh, but he was one person I was really looking forward uh to spending time with. But he was one of, caught not so many uh that tried to get there.

• 14:49Mario Gabriele?

  You, I can't help myself because I'm just curious about this stuff. Like, what was it about Siskin that, you know, you were like, this guy, you know, really has so, some way of thinking about things or some theory or whatever it is that, that is magnetic to me?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  So he was at that time thinking about Gravitational waves and how graviton can have a different answer to general relativity. And he was really challenging status quo. And I still remember like when we were, uh, he had this thing called halo theory. Uh, when we were in high school and undergrad, that was not widely accepted and it was still an outlier theory. And the last four years, it's become widely accepted and he's gotten a lot of prominence for it. Uh, it was just that he's like, I believe this, this is, this is the only way possible. Uh, a second thing for me was he was really close to, uh, Feynman. Uh, he was one of his best friends, uh, and he had a lot of similarities to the way they thought. And that it, that, the, the, the way that they taught other people, uh, they probe them to think deeper, think of first principles.

• 15:46Mario Gabriele?

  That's really fascinating. The, uh, I just for the first time this year read, what is it? Uh, I think it's called You Must Be Joking with Richard Feynman. Um, it's sort of a story of his life. Um, it was one of the most colorful characters that you can ever imagine. And in some ways, look, he was obviously an amazing, uh, physicist. But in many ways, I read that book and saw so many traits that you see with great founders, like, you know, this total, almost playfulness with problem solving. And finding all these shortcuts to things and just, you know, rule breaking and all these ways. Um, anyway, so it's really interesting to hear about that relationship with Siskin.

• 16:24Mario Gabriele?

  And so then, you know, you're, you're sort of going through this moment of realizing the life path I'm on isn't going to get me where I hope to go. And then COVID sort of interrupts things. Is that roughly the right timing?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It's about around this time. So COVID happened, literally freshman year, end of winter quarter for me. So I was six months into my college journey, COVID happens and you get sent back home. I go back to Abu Dhabi, I do this, uh, continuous physics research over the summer as well. And by the end of it, I'm like, yeah, this is not going to be super exciting for me. I decide to take a year off because I didn't want to do online college. Uh, I did not think it was worth wasting one year of college doing online course studies. Cause at the end of the day, college experience is about being with people and, uh, learning from each other. And almost all of my friend group decided we're going to take a year off and I was still trying to figure out what to do. One of the things that uh was uh something to keep myself busy uh was continuing on the nonprofit that I started in high school.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  It's called Club Rise, uh but like when I'd gone to Stanford, I sort of stopped working on it. Uh so I picked it up again and started working on this interesting problem statement of how do you reduce waste of expired consumer goods? Uh and while doing that, I ended up turning that entire project into a for-profit company.

• 17:38Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. You you succeeded in the open AI transmutation from nonprofit to for-profit.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um it it just felt like an interesting opportunity.

• 17:48Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Uh that you can commercialize this as well. So I moved back to uh India. Uh this was my first time actually going to India for anything other than meeting my grandparents. Uh after I'd moved to UAE, I found a co-founder through my cousin. I asked him, who's the smartest person you know? He pointed me to someone. Uh and we both hit it off. Uh we moved it into this uh uh uh house in Delhi and started building from there. Uh so that was the first actual experience with tinkering with building anything tech-related or product.

• 18:19Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, okay. Well, fascinating. I hadn't realized that. Also, probably, you know, I always think there's almost a seminal moment of earning your first dollar over the internet or, you know, through a business that, you know, so that was sort of this moment for you in a way. And so what was the nonprofit version and then what was the sort of for-profit?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So the problem statement was essentially that um a lot of consumer good companies actually don't sell their goods to supermarkets. They rent shelf space. So that means that I'm getting a right to put, uh I guess, a hundred cans of my milk on the Waitrose shelves. And if those milk go unsold and they're about to expire, I have to pick them off the shelf and then dispose them. Now, that means that if a milk carton is going to expire tomorrow, there's almost zero chance that someone's going to buy that off the shelf. But at the same time, there are a lot of industries that can consume that milk on the same day. And that is primarily the hotel, restaurants, cafe, horreca industry. And we were like, okay, fine. I mean, there's a tremendous added cost. I mean, obviously, revenue lost, but there's added cost for them to transport these goods and then dispose them.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  What if we can connect these near expired products to the horreca industry? And get them to buy these goods at a cheaper cost. And still fantastic, all fine goods, right? Uh, so that's what we started with. It was just a way to reduce wasted in the city. Um, and while we were doing it, we realized that a lot of restaurants, uh, just wanted to buy things in bulk. They were like, oh, this is fantastic. So the parallel thought over there was, uh, if we can get economies of scale with these items like butter sticks that people wanna buy or uh, rice packets, what if like communities of people wanna buy in bulk? Uh, we're essentially cutting out the retailer here, so they're getting it for cheaper. Uh, so the idea was that India actually has hundreds of thousands of these gated societies.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Where people live in apartment complexes and those apartment complexes have like five hundred to a thousand family, uh, members living in there. If all of them buy groceries individually, if they were able to directly buy from manufacturers or producers, they would be able to cut out middlemen and then save twenty to thirty percent. A second thing was also that India has a high population of homemakers or wives that don't work, that are still quite entrepreneurial. Um, so companies like Amve, which is a German brand, have found a lot of success doing sort of distribution through these homemakers. And they're okay, fine. If we can find one or two women in these societies that wanna just distribute these goods, all of them collectively save twenty, thirty percent on their bills, that could be an interesting model.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So that's what we were building. So it's called, uh, grocery, uh, grocery and ami, the French word for friend. Uh, we started doing this, uh, we started finding these cloud supermarkets within these societies, found entrepreneurial women that would do the distribution. We got a lot of the. Brands on boarded and plus local producers that wanted to sell directly. Um, it was a good, good start.

• 21:04Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, really interesting. I love, I love hearing these early stories of, of, you know, what people build before. Maybe the thing that hopefully they spend their life on or the next, you know, couple of decades on. So with gross on me, where did, what was the sort of close up to that story? Were you just, did you reach a point where you thought, I can't be as ambitious as I want to with this or?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  So still think, I mean, I, I, I liked working on it, but I did not think that FMCG was gonna be my life's work. Obviously it was an interesting problem statement. It was getting me through this COVID gap here. I was learning a lot. I didn't know what a P and L was before I even like started grossing it, right? Uh, picked up and didn't know anything about business, uh, really. The crucial moment over here was my co-founder had to leave because of some family emergency. And he was like, I cannot not own.

• 21:45Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  So he went back, uh, and got a job at Adobe, uh, and I was like, fine, I'm not gonna do this alone.

• 21:50Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Uh, so I moved back to Abu Dhabi, uh, got a couple of internships and that was the end of it.

• 21:55Mario Gabriele?

  Okay. And then you go back to Stanford with the idea of, hey, I'm gonna go sort of network, but really I'm on the lookout for my next company.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I think that was, that was pretty clear that I liked doing this. I had one of my best times of my life just building gross me. And I think it was just the fact that you could do things very quickly. Uh, your feedback loops are very short. Uh, you could, uh, find, uh, consumer fit if you worked hard enough. And it felt like something that was entirely in your control. And I was like, okay, this is a game that I can definitely play. Uh, so yeah, the idea was definitely to try to see what happens. And the couple of internships that I tried doing were also in that area. Try to invest in banking internship, hated it.

• 22:33Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Uh, trying to VC.

• 22:35Mario Gabriele?

  Been gone, gone nuts.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Uh, and I tried a VC internship and I was sitting there just like telling myself, I can build this. Like, why am I playing on the other side of the table?

• 22:43Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah.

• 22:45Mario Gabriele?

  Interesting. Um, it's funny to me, the, the fast feedback loops, in many ways it feels like. If you had continued in physics, your life would have been like some of the slowest feedback loop possible, right? So you're really built for this environment. And so then you start this new company, which is initially called Vance. What's the, what's the sort of moment of deciding to drop out for the second time and go in on this new idea?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  So this is actually a story that not a lot of people know, but I started working on Vance in the summer that I went back after Grossman, right? So John, who was my freshman year roommate at Stanford, he came to Abu Dhabi to spend time with me. He's like, yeah, apart, we'll hang out over the summer. And I was interning at this VC firm called Cheruk. And both of us were just tinkering out with ideas. He's like, apart, let's start a crypto hedge fund. I'm like, I don't want to do a crypto hedge fund. And so we were tinkering out with this idea of pay now, buy later. And what this meant was, our hypothesis was very simple. It was, it was actually based on the Starbucks gift card. I don't know if you know this, but Starbucks actually has a tremendous amount of capital under their belt.

• 23:50Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, it's a great bank.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great bank.

• 23:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. I wrote a piece on this because I became fascinated with the fact that Starbucks is at low key a really good bank.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Correct, it is, right? And the breakage fees that are able to earn on that and the interest on the AUM. It's insane. And we were like, why can't small businesses also do something like this? Because an average individual interacts with five or six businesses that they have a very high affinity with. So the salon that I go to is the salon I'm going to go to for the next two years, right? I don't change my hair salons every, every week, right? So our idea was, what if we enabled small businesses to be able to take capital from their customers upfront and then promise them goods or services for later? And the good thing is that with these goods and services that they're promising them later, maybe additional, for example, let's say, I can buy 12 haircuts for the price of 11. The 12th haircut, the cost of that haircut is significantly lower than the revenue that you earn.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  So our actual cost on the entire capital upfront is very, very low. Same with coffee, right?

• 24:45Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Coffee does not cost you $5, it costs you half a dollar.

• 24:48Mario Gabriele?

  Totally.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  For the customer, it feels like a lot of reward. For you, the cost is very less. This is what we started tinkering around with. We went back to San Diego. I dropped out of this internship. I was like, I need to go. This is not going to work out for me. So we went back to San Diego. We got a few businesses on boarded. And this is like 20, 25 days before school was going to start. We got a nail salon on board, we got a boba shop on board and a few other businesses. We built a hacky solution and we applied to YC on a whim. But let's see what happens.

• 25:15Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  We went back to college and we were still tinkering about this idea of what it means to get capital early for businesses and how are the ways that they can unlock capital without going to traditional equity or debt processes. So we're still thinking about that and then we get a call from Y C, well, an email from Y C for an interview and that was, I think, the second critical moment where we had to decide, do we do this or do we not?

• 25:40Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, is this a side project or is this something we're really going to spend some time on?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Correct. We told Y C that we were still tinkering about this idea. We don't know if it's true. We don't know if it's going to scale. They're like, that's fine, come interview with us. We interviewed with them, they accepted us and we decided we're going to go do this. And we're still debating where to build this, what to build, and we ended up settling on India. And he was very fascinated with India. I'd just come back from India and I was like, yeah, it's a great place to build. So we decided that we'll tinker a model a little bit. We realized that 10% plus of India's economy is software export and a lot of these companies don't get venture equity, right? It's such top 0.1% of companies that get venture equity.

• 26:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And almost all of these companies though have no access to debt because in India, if you don't have tangible assets, you're not going to get bank debt. So a lot of these companies that have contracted revenue are not able to access capital upfront. So what if you were able to underwrite their ARR, give them capital and then take ownership of their receivables, package that and then sell it upstream to institutional investors?

• 26:42Mario Gabriele?

  It's really interesting because you're, in many ways, in the same problem space and solving sort of the same problem, but you went from, how do I help people get a free extra boba and give this boba shop in San Diego extra working capital to Indian SAS? So to sort of dig into that, like, what was the decision around, hey, actually, India is the right place to build? Was that sort of more intuitive or did you guys sort of think about running down all of these scenarios?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  No, at that point, it was intuitive. I think John and I got better at making decision framing processes. I think it was just like, hey, where are we gonna do this thing? And like, why not go to India? It's one of the most uh booming economies. And uh there was a promise of SaaS was very big and India had a booming SaaS economy. We'll go do that. The process of shifting from SMEs to this uh was essentially, did we wanna run an ops company or no? Because this would be very, very ops heavy. And we both said, we're not the people that will do fantastic ops business.

• 27:38Mario Gabriele?

  Uh we're gonna go hand to hand to every salon and uh yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  It's just an uh as a work area, you have to get thousands of SMEs over here. You have to get a few hundred companies on board to build a really large lending book. And the second thing was um if you do the first model, you're not actually lending. You just get a SaaS fee. Whereas if you do, you're lending here, you create an AUM, you can earn way more transaction fees. Uh so that was the second idea.

• 28:00Mario Gabriele?

  I think it's roughly around this point that you meet our our mutual friends, the Hummingbird folks, who, as we both know at this point, have like a a very distinctive and unique way of looking at venture. And you know, as I've heard the story from parts from you, parts from them, they were sort of pretty upfront with you. They were like, hey, we're not so crazy about this idea. Is that right?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Well, they didn't say it back then.

• 28:22Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  They did, they did say it after we told them that we don't think this is gonna work out. Uh so I'll tell you the timeline, right? So we finish off this uh uh term at Stanford in December uh of twenty twenty one. We moved to Bombay uh in Jan of twenty twenty two and we start working on this idea. The Y C batch starts then and we end up meeting them in February. What we managed to do within those forty five days is actually get operations off the ground and get five loans out as well. So we got lending books uh ready, we got partnerships done, we got a legal structure set up. We did some BD and we actually found five companies that were worth giving capital to. And that's when we got connected to Akshare. At that point, we went through the process, we met Baron, Farad, the partners at Hummingbird, fantastic folks.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And they decided to invest uh in us, a small trick on the entire C drum. And a month later, still in the Y C batch, we told them that, hey, we've realized realized some ground truths that we didn't know before, which is there's a certain amount of businesses that have contracted revenue, but a vast majority of businesses are actually death shops. So there's no contractual revenue here. You can still do lending, but it's not gonna be back off some receivables. And hence, you're not, you're not gonna be able to package it, you're not gonna be able to sell it off upstream. So you're just a lending company and uh. Both of us were not super excited. And they're like, okay, we know that. And they asked us, what are you going to do next? We're like, we don't know. And they still gave us a second part of the seed round. That was a story.

• 29:41Mario Gabriele?

  Well, as you know, they they are indexing so much on the person. It's always hard to sort of introspect about yourself, but as they would tell you, they're they're looking for a truly the top basis point in terms of a builder. What do you think they saw in you very early in your career? And you know, you were probably a bit more raw in the way that you were thinking about a business. Like, what were the traits that maybe stuck out?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I think at that point, the only things that internalized about building a company was you needed to move quick. And you need to find, again, the top basis point of talent.

• 30:14Mario Gabriele?

  You had already figured that part out, that you needed to be really strong on the talent lens.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Correct. And a part of that was Y C. Y C really, really, like, I guess a couple of conversations by C really nailed down the fact that you should be anal about who you have in the team and who you don't have in the team. The worst person in your team, dictator, working style and culture, right? And I think that's what Hummingbird and we saw I do I own. And they were like, okay, that's fantastic. We were also able to build a very strong team. By the way, this other person who was my co-founder at Grosso Me.

• 30:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Was our second hire.

• 30:47Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  He's our head of engineering today.

• 30:49Mario Gabriele?

  No kidding. I had that thought in my head. I'm like, I hope that guy came came back somewhere. Okay, great.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  The first person we hired was a lawyer. He was the second person. And he scaled very well. He's building the entire engineering team at Aspora now.

• 31:01Mario Gabriele?

  Wow. So you had great taste even back then. The heuristic of asking your cousin, who's the smartest person you know, is not a bad way to find out.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Well, he was an engineer himself. He was at a top university.

• 31:10Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  You that was a little bit of sub selection, but yeah.

• 31:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, depends on the cousin. And so you realize that the the current version of of Vance at that point was not going to be the right thing. And you'll help me figure out exactly what the sort of order of operations was. But there's a certain point at which I remember you telling me that you almost ran like a series of sprints with your team to try and find like, hey, we don't have the right idea any anymore, we think, but we're not going to just give up. So we need to find some sort of structure to ideate, which I think is really. So many founders hit that point where they realize the thing they wanted to do is not working. And I think it's really hard to build a structure for yourself to get to that point of discovery. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I have to give credit where it's due. We came across this conversation of the Zip founder, the procure to pay.

• 32:01Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he talked about how he came up with the Zip idea and he has 10 point checklist on what you should consider in building a business. Obviously, it was not entirely that. There was a starting point of how we realized that we should have a structured process as we're going through this because we have money in the bank. We have some fantastic engineers that we've hired and we can definitely think about what to do. What we would do is come up with problem spaces or revenue pools that we wanted to. I think about this industry, speak to people in those industries and understand what problem statements look like. So you're speaking to hedge fund managers, engineers that work at hedge funds, crypto traders, finance teams. We're checking out the CFO stack. We're looking at personal finance across Nigeria, US, Eastern Europe, all across, right?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  So we're exploring ideas throughout and whatever we used to narrow down, we would try to build an MVP very, very quickly. And then put it in hand to people, either through an Excel sheet or a WhatsApp chat or a janky app on Android. And that was a process and doing that, our team was very engaged because they were like, okay, we're part of this process. We're not sitting down because you've hired some great people, seven or eight of them. And starting telling them that the company that they take their risk on.

• 33:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Is not not doing anything is very daunting, right? And so if they don't get work or they don't get intellectual stimulation, it's easy for them to decide to leave. So that was very important and that's the process we ended up going through.

• 33:21Mario Gabriele?

  How long was sort of each of those sprints? Did you think about them within a certain duration?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  I think we ran some of them parallelly as well, two to four weeks. For example, one of them was almost all of generated in India happens through physical checks and.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Penetration of digital payments in P2P payment is very high and P2M is very high, peer to merchant, but merchant to merchant is almost always checks. And we were thinking, what is the way for us to digitize checks? And we went ahead and built a product and we actually took it out to thousands of merchants and we tried, we shipped our team to different remote parts of India and tried to see if it works. Everyone enjoyed the process, but we realized that there's this one key thing missing, which is recourse. Everyone loves checks because they can give credit with great recourse. They can post their checks. So I, as a business, can write a check for you that is dated 15 days from now and I get credit with that by not paying it right now, but then you also have surety that I can always cash this. That was the fundamental feature that it's very hard to replicate with digital products.

• 34:19Mario Gabriele?

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• 35:03Mario Gabriele?

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• 35:42Speaker 01

  So I called one of my friends, Meho. He's a fantastic guy. He's, I mean, one of the reasons that we ended up doing well is because he was my coach and therapist.

• 35:50Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  He's a Y C founder as well. So he's like, well, just get a lawyer. And that's the first thing you should do. And I was glad that that was the first thing I did. He told me, okay, in front of you, what are options? Can investors actually ask you for the money back legally? And he's like, they don't, but if you want, you can return it. And that gave me at least a sense of footing that, okay, it's my battle to play here and I decide how to play my cards. The second thing I did is I was very candid with my team. I spoke with them individually, told them what had happened and told them, hey, man, it's completely okay. If you wanna leave, I'll make sure that you get a decent severance and you are able to find a new job. Thankfully, all of them stayed back. And not a single person left us from that moment till another three months before we decided what we were actually gonna do.

• 36:33Mario Gabriele?

  Three months between that moment and figuring it out?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:37Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, wow, that's a long time.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Well, two, two and a half, yeah. I think this happened in July, end of July, early August. And we decided what we're gonna do in October. And then we ended up launching Aspora's first product in December.

• 36:49Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, not a long time in terms of, you know, no judgment, more just like to keep people, to manage to retain people during that time. Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  So this is happening, January, moved to Bangalore till December, the first version of Aspora that came out. And then I spoke to investors, I told them, hey, guys, this is what's happened, this was the background, this is what we're trying to do. The truth is, I don't wanna return the money. I will still wanna continue building. I spoke to them a day after all of this happened, because I wanted to settle down. The fundamental question I asked myself is, if Aspora, or at that point Vance, shuts down, what will I do? And the answer was, I'll start another company.

• 37:20Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And then probably in financial services, because I really, really liked it. I was like, okay, fine, let's just do this. I spoke to them, they were like, but how are we gonna run this company alone? Had to convince them that, hey, we can still figure this out. I'm gonna be a solo founder. These are the X, Y, Z things I will have to do as a solo founder, still be successful. Told them the team is still behind me, I spoke to the team. They're like, yeah, yeah, the team is still behind you. Uh, and yeah, from there, three things we did, we were trying to figure out uh what product to build. Uh, we were still continuing iterating. Uh, we had this small legal battle with the co-founder, John, trying to figure out how do we do severance correctly?

• 37:55Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Uh, can we actually discuss, because we were both co-CEOs, we both had a say on what to do with the capital. That was a weird position and investors were on a safe note, so they had absolutely no say. Uh, and the third one uh was just keeping myself sane and saying that you can still do this.

• 38:11Mario Gabriele?

  How did you do that?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Just like, speaking to my parents and I guess my friend, that was the only way. And they were like, yeah, I probably will figure it out.

• 38:17Mario Gabriele?

  You said you had made this list of sort of, here's X, Y, Z of things I need to do as a solo founder that I maybe didn't need to do before. What was sort of mentally on that list? And as you think of it now, I'm curious how you think about, are you built to be a solo founder? Was that like actually the right path for you?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone should be a solo founder. Uh, I, I definitely think that you should. It's just easier, like uh when you have people around you that are on the same boat as you. Because as the company scales, your employees uh start taking up functions, you hire over them and then uh the company grows. And there's no one next to you, right? It becomes quite lonely. Having a co-founder is always best. But what I realized that back then, the biggest failure point for me would be uh thinking I was right and having no one that had the thought to challenge me. So the biggest thing that I had to do was create a culture where everyone can speak their minds. Uh, everyone can be challenged, especially me, because I'm going to say forty to fifty percent things that are just not going to be the right ideas or right decisions.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And someone had to be there to check me as well, because with a co-founder, there's always uh always brutal uh honesty with employees, that's so. And especially if you scale. So that's something that I was very candid with the team and sort of inculcated that up to today.

• 39:29Mario Gabriele?

  How did you get folks to feel comfortable doing that? Because there's one, you know, it's sort of the classic thing of your boss says, hey, I, I love feedback, but there's, you know, an internal block maybe of giving that to someone.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  I think not, not having a knee-jerk reaction to feedback, I mean, like just taking it well, right? Showing them that you care about it. Uh, also, uh, my ex-co-founder had a lot to do with it because he was comfortable and he, we, we were friends. And he would call me out uh in like meetings and be like, wow, that is a stupid idea.

• 39:54Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  So when you see people doing it uh and you're okay with it, then that's when it happens.

• 39:58Mario Gabriele?

  You sort of, people get comfortable with that behavior?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to keep doing that. As I'm scaling, I'm realizing I'm losing a little bit of it.

• 40:04Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  But that's really, really important.

• 40:06Mario Gabriele?

  Maybe some of the folks that have been there long enough.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  They are especially.

• 40:09Mario Gabriele?

  Feel more comfortable.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 40:11Mario Gabriele?

  But the new folks are sort of, as you, as you sort of scale and scale, it maybe becomes harder, right? So after that moment, there's this three-month period. When is the moment that you sort of land on the idea for Aspora that, that you were like, hey, this, this could really work?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  I think it was not one conversation, it was a series of conversations. We were still trying to do this thing, right? Where we're speaking to people in different industries, trying to understand their business context or professional context as to less their person lies. And we realized that a good chunk of people that we were speaking to turned out to be immigrants. They'd moved from one country to another three to 10 years ago. And one common thing they mentioned was it was hard for them to manage finances across borders. And there are three things to it, right? The fourth, it was very hard to manage multiple accounts. Like everywhere I'm going, I'm opening new accounts, I don't remember my passwords, and it's just, I don't know where my money is. Second was taxation is bloody complicated. I don't know where I'm supposed to pay which tax. Any tax consultant that I hired does not know anything about the other country. That's very hard. Third is I don't know how to deploy capital wealth, how to manage it.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And the fourth was the payment is still very hard. And that became a repeated pattern and we kept seeing it again and again. We realized there are companies like Premately and Wise that are, that are in this space.

• 41:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  But they don't really solve banking for you as a, as a global consumer, right? They only solve payments.

• 41:26Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Uh, which is an important piece, but I would have naturally assumed that the next step would have been, well, we'll solve entire banking for you. I know Wise in 2018, 2019 rebranded to, from Francois's to Wise.

• 41:37Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  To do that, but the fundamental flaw for them was that they were spread to then to be multiple diasporas or multiple immigrants groups or ICPs, customer personas. That would be very hard for them to go deep because every person needed a different solution. Um, and then we realized that, okay, we have something at our hand here. We ended up doing a bunch of research, realized there's a power law of number of countries where immigrants come from and the number of countries that they go to. It's about eight and eight, the largest developing countries, the largest developed countries. Uh, so you don't really need to do 200 to 200 mapping. It's about seven to seven, eight to eight, and you can capture a large portion of the revenue pools here. And then we started digging into, well. NRI diaspora. And the first victim was my dad and his friends and people that I knew.

• 42:20Mario Gabriele?

  And NRI just for people as non-resident Indian?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Correct. These are people that have left India, uh, living outside and they can either have an inpospor or a foreign pospor at that point. Um, yeah, and so UAE is filled with them, right? So UAE has ten million, uh, population, three million of who are NRIs. Um, and I realized this problem was way closer to home than I realized. And it was structural as well, right? So as you move as an immigrant from one country to another, the country that you move to is not great with banking new immigrants. In general, they don't know how to assimilate you with credit, with banks, with wealth. Uh, and also you're lost as to what to do. And the second is the country that you're moving from is not fantastic with, uh, banking their diaspora. And that's primarily because almost everyone spent time on, in the last ten years of fintech evolution,

• 43:08Speaker 01

  these largest immigrant, uh, these largest developing countries on their local populations. For example, India has a billion and a half people that they built payment infrastructure for. They didn't think what it would be for NRIs. So just going slightly deeper into NRIs, NRIs are required to have a, a, a special bank account. It's called a non-resident account, uh, because they have different tax treatments for you. There are some benefits, uh, and the government wants to be clear about what is foreign money, what is not. Capital controls, uh, and this account opening process is forty-five days. As a result, sixty to seventy percent NRIs globally don't have access to this account. And without this account, you can't invest in any, you can't take credit. But then everyone does, they use their mother's account, their brother's account. Uh, so there's a lot of, uh, workarounds to this, but the entire financial ecosystem was broken.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  And the second thing is, this is despite them disproportionately contributing to the financial services landscape. So the number that we ended up concluding was close to one-third of all of India's consumer deposits, which is about a trillion dollars, comes from the diaspora. So 1% of the population contributes to 30% of deposits. And this was consistent across diasporas. It was the same for Filipinos, it was the same for Nigerians, Chinese, that they wanted to bank back home. There's a sense of nostalgia, growing economies, and it's just not easy.

• 44:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's so interesting. There's these sort of structural things. And just to sort of recap it to make sure I'm, you know, understanding it well enough and readers or listeners are understanding it well enough. It's like, an Indian person moves to the UAE. The UAE doesn't really know what credit that person should have or, you know, what sort of banking, how they should fit into the existing banking system. But India has sort of not washed their hands of them, but it's sort of like, hey, you have to fit into this very specific set of capital controls, this bank account. And as a result, folks are finding these back doors or side doors of saying, hey, I'm going to invest in real estate through my mom's account or I'm going to send money through this way. And so you've sort of took as a problem statement,

• 45:06Mario Gabriele?

  building for this diaspora, this NRI group that is asymmetric in terms of its actual size, but its sort of financial size. When did the realization that sort of stablecoin should be a really important part of that solution come into it?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  I think we tinker around with the idea of stablecoins very early on, right? So we launched our first product in December of 2022. We got our first users around January of 2023. And around that time, we were thinking about stablecoins. But we took a call against it because we were like, oh, regulations aren't clear. We don't know if this is actually a way that we should go about things. And we knew there were a couple of benefits of using it. We said, okay, fine, it's not clear. Back at that time, we actually were exploring gold-based settlements as well. But okay, fine, we can buy digital gold in one country, settle in another, and that's where we can settle.

• 45:58Mario Gabriele?

  Wow.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So it was not a common place to think about stablecoins.

• 46:02Mario Gabriele?

  No, yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Right? So we tried a couple of things. We were like, we don't know if people are doing this. So we shoved that idea. When it really became important and pressing for us to think about this was... When in March of twenty twenty three, our volumes were going up and our cash balance was going down because we're still burning money as a company. And to do settlements to a foreign country, you need some working capital in that country because you're buying FX ahead. Banks in India only work eight hours on weekdays. So if you wanna do instant settlements for your customers, you need to buy capital or buy INR and then store it in that country. So you need some working capital and we were deploying our equity money over there. And as the volumes are growing and our cash balance is coming down, it was like a fatal pinch.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And we're like, we have to do something. You can have constant purchase of INR throughout the day and throughout the weekends. So your working capital requirement went from X to point two.

• 46:56Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, wow. Wow, that's really interesting. To to give folks sort of a sense of the the scale here and maybe the the idea of like what, you know, how to wrap their heads around the product. How do you sort of pitch Aspora today? And what is what are the sort of scale we're talking about?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Today, Aspora in its current form, let's say you send money from, well, I guess, five developed countries back to India and also pay your bills back home. They have electricity, utility, my credit card payments or mobile recharges. We are processing close to half a billion dollars of volume every month. Uh, that's about close to four and a half, five percent of the inward remittances that India receives every year. And that's primarily from two countries. Uh, we've recently gone live with Europe and the US as well. And those are scaling markets and we have a few other countries that are taking life. But what is exciting is our roadmap. So how I pitched to new NRI is like, we will be your primary bank across the two countries that you live in. You don't need any other financial institution after us.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  And that's because we give you a NRI bank account back in India. We give you a GDP bank account here. They work seamlessly with each other. You have one card that you can use across the world, zero Forex fees, and we allow you to invest in both of these countries. Obviously, that is a roadmap and we're gonna be launching these over the next six to nine months. But that's what we're super excited about.

• 48:12Mario Gabriele?

  And in terms of remittances, you know, you say maybe five percent of inflows. India is, as I as I understand, the biggest remittance economy in the world, right? And also, uh, I'm sure you know this, but there was a a report this week talking about crypto adoption globally. You know, and there's different ways they sort of measure that. But across a number of different metrics, India is number one. Uh, and so it really, you know, is is obviously so. Inherent to who you are and your story, you were an NRI, right? You are an NRI. But also, there are such analytical reasons why this really makes sense, it feels like.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely, I agree with you.

• 48:51Mario Gabriele?

  One thing that I'm interested in is, in a way, I can't think of another neo-bank or financial story that has framed themselves the way that you guys do. There are obviously lots of global fintechs, but not one that says, like, hey, we're actually for diasporas. Like, that's sort of in our DNA in some way. And it raises the question for me of, why is that the right framing for this? And is there sort of enough similarity across Indian diaspora, Pakistani diaspora, Turkish, whatever you want to pick, for that to be like a meaningful, unifying characteristic?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  I'll tell you the truth behind it, right? Some of it is obviously current and present branding. When we started this all, our goal was, today, finances across borders are broken. And it's not just for consumers, it's not just for diasporas, anyone that has any use cases around sending money between countries or managing multiple currencies. And that's SMEs, freelancers, corporates, and the plumbing itself is broken between these countries. And our idea with Aspora was, well, it's a design problem, right? You're able to now, with Aspora, get licenses and regulatory infrastructure in eight of the largest economies in the world. But then, as you expand diasporas, also eight of the largest developing countries in the world.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And once you build this plumbing, you have a platform that you can do infrastructure plays on, you can do B2B banking plays on, consumer banking plays on. And that's really the goal, right? So while diaspora banking is our short term and what we're building on the consumer aspect of it, we've already started building our infrastructure. We already allow other businesses to use our rails to send money to India. We've launched a couple of other countries there. But the goal is evolving Aspora into a global bank that anyone can use, because we're building all of this infrastructure and finding the best way to move money and information.

• 50:48Mario Gabriele?

  And how do you think about taking the right steps towards that? Because if you're saying global infrastructure and the application layer, you could go in any number of directions, right?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Correct. So this is the point where... It's really important to understand where to allocate capital. And the approach we've taken so far is be commercial first. Figure out what allows you to get the most revenue, the most relevant users. What can allow you to cross sell from there on? How can you build synergies? The reason we chose Philippines as the next diaspora is because we ended up getting licenses in the US. And there's a very high concentration of Philippines in the US. And we're like, okay, fine. And we decided to wait till we went to the US to launch Philippines. But the idea is try to chase revenue pools, try to chase adjacencies to your current business model. And at the same time, keep building infrastructure.

• 51:35Mario Gabriele?

  And in terms of the product part, you know, you started with, you know, the wedge being transferring, right? The remittances, which on the one hand is amazing when you think about, you know, how you want to build one of these companies because it's so high volume, high, you know, high frequency. It feels like you can capture a lot of people quickly. And if you compete on price and ease of use, like people are very happy to switch, right? There's like very low switching costs. But the downside feels like there's low switching costs. So, you know, if someone else comes in.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 52:02Mario Gabriele?

  So how do you think about like deepening?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Urgency that our team obsesses on, right? And so we realized that what we've done is not unique. Anyone can come and out price you, have a better experience, hopefully not better experience, but at least out price you. And for that, you need to get deep into the consumer wallet very, very quickly. So we are building three to four products that we think all of our users desperately need. They will pay money for, they will use a week on week. And a large part of that is what will allow us, what is our right to win on the first couple of products? And then which products will allow us to then do the most cross sell? A secondary dimension here is that we are in a regulated space. So a lot of our roadmap is also driven by the regulator.

• 52:43Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. You know, let's talk about that piece actually, because we've obviously seen a lot of momentum around the regulatory stuff within the US. You know, how much does that impact you, given the markets that you already serve? And then, you know, then we can talk about, you know, India's regulatory environment.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I think the Genius Act. Is great that it happened now. I was thinking about it, right? Like, is it better off that it happened now? Or should it have happened slightly earlier or slightly later? I think we are the highest benefactors of it. Because what it allowed is a lot of focus of talent and capital in this market. So people are like, oh, this is an interesting space. So the best talent wants to work in this space. And the best capital pools find themselves attracted to this space. And we've been able to ride some early tailwinds, get some traction that allows us to attract both of this talent and capital pool. So I think it's rightly time for us.

• 53:39Mario Gabriele?

  Interesting. To push back on it, isn't there a part of you that wishes you'd had an extra two years before this had happened? You got a little bigger and then suddenly this happens and, you know, you're almost too big to compete with for a lot of people.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Maybe a year. But think about it, right? Like, we were able to raise a series A and series B primarily because Bridge got acquired by Stripe. And then everyone started talking about stablecoins. So I think we had the right tailwinds. Maybe the genius act itself could have come a year out again. But I think with our business, product velocity matters way more. And anyone can kill us regardless, a year or two years out as well.

• 54:19Mario Gabriele?

  How do you view stablecoin's perception in the market today? Because on the one hand, there are real volumes that are happening that are, you know, just continue to sort of reach new highs. And the adoption is growing really substantially. So there's these fundamentals that are just true about the way that they're being utilized. But on the other hand, there is almost so much excitement that I wonder, has it still gone maybe a little bit over the top? Like, are we do a micro correction, a macro correction on how people view stablecoins? Or actually, is it, you know, is that totally the wrong way to view it? And we're just, you know, in the early innings here.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Stablecoins will not create. Fundamentally new revenue pools, they will to an extent, but not to the extent that AI will, right? They're not gonna, they're not gonna double or triple the revenue pools that exist in finance. What they'll do is they will enable cost reductions massively across the board. The SWIFT network is clunky, terrible, prohibits trade, prohibits uh uh value exchange and it's peace for everyone. That will get replaced, hopefully. Exchanges don't run twenty four seven, it's T plus two day settlement. Uh all of that will get streamlined. So there will be a lot of efficiency over the next ten, fifteen years with stablecoin product uh uh adoption across the board, across industry, like finance will feel real time.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Uh and that will create a lot of great businesses. It might not create trillion dollar industries. Uh and that's where I think some of the misplaced belief from capital accusers might come in. But there are still great infra and application consumer level businesses to be built out.

• 55:52Mario Gabriele?

  In terms of India's regulatory environment, we talked about, you know, this is obviously such a big remittance economy. This is a big crypto economy. And in many ways, India has been incredibly forward looking in terms of building, you know, maybe we call it civilian tech or tech, you know, sort of this infrastructure for the country with UPI and so on and so forth. How has the sort of government or, you know, regulators, how have they looked at crypto from the stablecoin perspective and, and, you know, the stuff that is relevant to you?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  So take a step back, right? Like with like most developing nations, what do regulators care about? They care about consumer protection and then national interest. I think crypto had a bad name in India, like other countries, where people are getting scammed. Uh ruck pulling was happening, uh so they were generally conservative. Uh but India also never had outright ban on crypto like China or other countries. They had like a regime where crypto exchanges could thrive recently. Coinbase invested in an Indian exchange at a $3 billion valuation.

• 56:50Mario Gabriele?

  And so in terms of the way that you need to work in the country, how much do you have to do through joint ventures or through other partners? Is that an important piece of doing what you actually want to do from a product perspective? Or is there enough freedom that you can move?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  So in India, it's a lot harder because almost all licenses are strictly guarded by the regulator. So for example, the first product that we're launching, which is the non-resident accounts, we're working with an Indian bank. They essentially were kind of like, okay, fine, you can come in, rework all our code base, you can build the product from scratch.

• 57:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  It will be powered by us, but you would have a right label experience. And the regulator is okay with those arrangements. What they're not okay is giving you a license on day one. What that allows us is to build presence. The regulator gets to know you, and then three to five years out, you can try to get your own license.

• 57:38Mario Gabriele?

  Fast forwarding, let's say, three years, what do you hope a Spora looks like? Where is it operational? What is it able to do for people?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 57:48Mario Gabriele?

  And maybe, let's say, 10 years, what's the version then?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  So, okay, three years. We definitely want to be live across four or five key diasporas. And we think Philippines, China, Egypt, Nigeria.

• 58:00Mario Gabriele?

  China, wow, wow.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 58:03Mario Gabriele?

  That's a level of complexity that I imagine is like, you know, real hard mode, right?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Correct, but why not? I know, I know, it's not easy, but it's got one of the largest diasporas, one of the largest remittance cards. It's the second largest remittance card, right? So why not try it? So be live across diasporas. And within these diasporas, be able to have these people manage money across borders, have multiple accounts, access to investing in the home country, host country, as well as USD. A lot of these immigrant populations have aspirational dollar dreams. So investing in the US stock market, take access to credit, credit cards, personal loans, insurances that cover you when you're traveling. One key thing that we also want to build for the Indian diaspora is a way for them to connect with their family back home. A lot of these people leave their family back home and there is a lot of guilt with leaving your parents.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  So if Aspora is able to take care of your family back home, there's a level of trust and.

• 58:55Mario Gabriele?

  What does that mean, sending money to their family or something else?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  No, so I can manage my parents' healthcare insurance. I'm gonna be able to get them a caretaker who can help them go to medical appointments. So build a healthcare infrastructure, manage their money. So having a way to control how they're spending, making sure they're not getting defrauded, all of that.

• 59:14Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, okay, fascinating. So these are the sort of things that because of the market you're going after, they're sort of unique product opportunities, right? It's not something a traditional neo-bank is thinking about.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 59:26Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, and so that's the three years, let's say, and ten years, what does that look like?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  We want to be HSBC's worst nightmare, but essentially at that point, we want to have a foothold into any consumer that is thinking of dealing in more than one currency. Uses us as a bank account, they can roam around the world, use us as a native bank account wherever they go. If they live in Singapore today and move to Australia, they're not, right? They, Aspora users here, they're gonna be Aspora users there. Click, simply add an Australian account and get on with their lives. And businesses can manage teams, vendors, buyers from around the world. They can manage money movement, they can manage their account in these countries.

• 1:00:05Mario Gabriele?

  In preparing for this episode, I spoke with Akshay, who you mentioned, and I was like, hey, what do you think are some questions that I should ask Parth? And he sent me a few suggestions, and one of them that I wanted to ask you about is you have what's called a new bets team on the company. Tell me about that and what do you, why have you sort of built that unit quite early in a company's life?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  It's a little bit of the Amazon philosophy, right? Where just do things because they help in your business and then you can spend them off. The reason we set up NewBet early on is because we're in this tectonic shift of stable coins. And we did not think of Aspora as a stablecoin backward business. But I definitely feel like as a company that has a decent amount of cash on our hands, it is worth allocating some of that to fundamentally stablecoin backward businesses and seeing if we can create a tremendous value out of that.

• 1:00:56Mario Gabriele?

  And so what does success from that division look like to you?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Doubling company valuation or delivering a similar amount of shareholder value, right? From a small investment, but it's finding a unique promise statement that we think it's gonna be a massive opportunity to stand us out. And then having like an ambitious. A super ninja team working on it for two to three years.

• 1:01:14Mario Gabriele?

  And what of those, some of those new bets looked like?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I would not.

• 1:01:18Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, fair enough. Amazing. Well, I've learned so much and, you know, to sort of wrap us up, maybe we move to a few more philosophical questions. If you had the resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this while I was coming here. And one thing that I've been thinking about since we've been building it for the last two years is today, foreign currency exchange still happens over bank counters, O D C traders, smaller exchanges. It's defragmented. It fragmented quite a bit. And it's opaque, clunky. What if there was one A P I or one protocol that could send money to whoever? And you don't have to worry about currencies, exchange rates, just transfer of value. You can operate in your native currency. They can operate in whatever currency they think is fair. And there's a global protocol that takes care of money movement. It happens instantly. It happens on the chain.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  It is dystopian. It is going to require more than technology, I guess, coordination.

• 1:02:25Mario Gabriele?

  What's a tradition or practice from another culture that you wish we would adopt more in, you know, our modern life?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  This is going to be slightly contradictory. But I'm a big believer that if you want to truly leapfrog a economy, the economy constituents, which are the individuals, need to work extremely hard. I'm a big fan of what China, Singapore, I guess, South Korea were able to do with a tremendous amount of concentrated and coordinated effort from the individuals. I feel modern economies sort of shunned that, or I guess modern politics sort of shunned that. But I still think like there's a population that should focus on that nine nine six mentality of let's make something fantastic. Let's make something that's going to leap on and make the next generation's life a lot easier. Would love to see that.

• 1:03:16Mario Gabriele?

  How do countries do that? How do you do that?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  I definitely do think that. It's very hard for democracies to do that. It is almost always impossible, right? You need a little bit of autocratic elements in a government in a country to be able to make that happen. We saw that with Li Kuan Yew, we saw that with the China's economy. And so the conclusion that I came to is any developing country, which is still a democracy, it's very hard for them to leapfrog.

• 1:03:43Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  And have to be some autocratic elements, obviously benevolent autocratic.

• 1:03:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Uh, that can make it happen.

• 1:03:48Mario Gabriele?

  But like a Li Kuan Yew, who, who, you know, was a sort of a benevolent autocrat in many ways. Yeah, for a leapfrogging mentality, that that makes sense. I suppose we are now entering a period where a lot of those democracies that have been at the vanguard have faded enough over the last thirty, forty years, we might say, that maybe there will be a point in the future where there's a degree of leapfrogging required.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  I guess so. I mean, we, we do these conversations that Europe is in decline or what's gonna happen in the next ten, fifteen years. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next fifteen to twenty years, one of these countries in Europe actually takes that stance and does go for that leapfrog mentality. And people are like, okay, now we need to really work hard to push ourselves. Otherwise, we will be.

• 1:04:34Mario Gabriele?

  Left behind in a way. Yeah, yeah. In terms of global competitiveness, there is, yeah, for Europe, for example, I think it's hard to argue against Europe becoming more competitive over the past thirty years. Um, and so there needs to be some sort of reversal there. Final question, if you could recommend, or rather assign a book to everyone on earth in your, in your benevolent autocracy, to have to everyone to read and understand, what would you want to assign to people?

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  If you're talking about in this framework, right, which is if people need to be highly motivated, I think you need to point out what sheer will can do as an individual. And there's a lot of examples, but I guess the most culturally relevant one and the people that people can see is, I guess, Elon Musk, the Water Isaacson's Elon Musk autobiography, not because it's a great literature, but in this context, just showing people what one human's tenacity and perceivance can make happen is like bizarre, right? Just tells you that, just work hard and things will happen.

• 1:05:32Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, if you, if you are willing to devote your, like, every, you know, drop of blood and. Give up potentially all of your relationships and experience like insane amounts of pain. It is like, yeah, I mean, it is remarkable what one person can achieve, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  I don't think that life is for everyone, but just knowing that you can achieve whatever you want to by dedicating yourself to it.

• 1:05:54Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Is enough power for you.

• 1:05:56Mario Gabriele?

  I agree.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  To not cry out.

• 1:05:57Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that people don't, people almost don't realize that it is possible. And I think there's, you know, a version of, of history that plenty of people subscribe to. And that I've really, the more I've watched exciting companies get built and, you know, studied history, come to really feel, doesn't make sense to me, which is this, you know, more bottoms up view of history where things are going to happen because they were going to happen already. And the society was ready for it when it really feels like extraordinary people who sacrifice an insane amount and usually have some sort of aspect to them that is hard for us to really feel full sympathy for, right? Like Elon Musk is a great example where I appreciate so much of what he's done and I have great admiration for him in other ways.

• 1:06:40Mario Gabriele?

  But there's also a part of me that, you know, I see what he is in many other places and think, God, you know, but I think that's just natural that.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  It is sanctity.

• 1:06:48Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, these people are, it's impossible to wrap your heads around them, but like they are the engines of progress in so many places and, and that is how stuff changes.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Do you know D Hawk, by the way?

• 1:06:58Mario Gabriele?

  No.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  The Visa founder?

• 1:06:59Mario Gabriele?

  No.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  So actually that is another.

• 1:07:02Mario Gabriele?

  Wait, what company?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Visa.

• 1:07:03Mario Gabriele?

  Visa. Uh, no, no, I've never studied that.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  That's actually a fantastic story. I think it's even more impressive than what Elon Musk has done. But Elon Musk went just like sheer will, uh, scream at everyone that comes in at front of you.

• 1:07:16Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Just outwork everyone.

• 1:07:17Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  D Hawk, to the problem that we were discussing earlier, if you wanted to create this ecosystem of everyone collaborating to create a common, uh, payment engine in the world. D Hawk did achieve that with Visa. Um, so early on, every bank had their own card, uh, system. He was able to convince everyone to unify it, give up their own revenue, and this was across hundreds of banks across the world. And it was one of the biggest coordination problems.

• 1:07:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. How did he do that?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Well, I guess perseverance, but then being able to, there's a lot of interesting stories of him using tactics to sway people, impress people, convince them one on one, convince them in large settings, just a preacher, and he said, we're gonna make a nonprofit organization, and it's gonna be this fantastic place, which allowed the world to leave. He showed the grand vision of what world could look like if tears out, and people fell one by one.

• 1:08:10Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, so he said it was gonna be a nonprofit?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, Visa was structured as a nonprofit when it initially began.

• 1:08:16Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, what it, wow, there's so many echoes of today. I can't help but think of OpenAI for that, of like this grand vision, the nonprofit, and then you figure out a way to turn this into

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:08:27Mario Gabriele?

  a massive for-profit company. Fascinating, man, I've got to research him clearly, because that's a kind of story I don't know if I've ever properly understood before.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that could be very interesting for your newsletter as well. It's actually very fascinating.

• 1:08:41Mario Gabriele?

  Man, well, that's a great place to end, because you're sending me down a new rabbit hole. So thank you so much, Parth, it was so lovely to chat.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Mario.

• 1:08:48Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 1:08:51Mario Gabriele?

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.