20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave

Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap of $1.1BN. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best-performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:09 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders 07:45 The Best Performing Fund Would Only Invest in YC Founders on Their Second Time 11:25 “We Went Public Too Late, It Was a Big Mistake” 17:53 Why Did Jason Choose to SPAC? 24:21 Why Does Jason Believe SPACs are Unfairly Demonised and Will Comeback? 29:47 How Does AI Change the Margin Structure of the Next Generation of Companies 33:14 Is Trump Better for Business than a Biden Administration? 38:35 Are We Heading into a Recession? Predictions for Next 12 Months? 46:26 Why Have No Neobanks Reached the Heights of Revolut in the US? 48:08 Why is the Opportunity in Low Income Banking Not High Income in the US? 50:07 Why Short Sellers Should Be Stopped and How Immoral They Are

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  $4 billion to $50 million market cap. Today, I have the founder of Dave, one of the US's leading neo-banks on the show. In 2022, they SPACs and went public at $4 billion. Excitement soon waned, though, and their market cap dropped to just $50 million.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  All of our pipe investors from our IPO failed before our lockup expired. Fin tech became a bad word. SPAC became a bad word.

• 0:26Harry Stebbings?

  They lost an incredible 98% of their value.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  I had no support in my stock. We were, we were [BLEEP].

• 0:33Harry Stebbings?

  But the turnaround has been one of the best on Wall Street. They've increased market cap by over 900%.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  The investments, again, in AI is really what led to a lot of the profitability.

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything you would have done differently about the process?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Honestly, I don't regret going out via SPAC. I think we just went public too late.

• 0:50Harry Stebbings?

  You went public too late?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I think the company realistically was ready to go public six to 12 months earlier. And...

• 0:59Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:43Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:25Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:06Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:49Harry Stebbings?

  Go to gusto.com/20vc. That's gusto.com/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Jason, dude, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. I'd heard so many great things from Imran and from Ash, so thank you for joining me, man.

• 4:06Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, thanks, Harry. Great to be here.

• 4:08Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I would love to start. You sold your first business for $85 million reportedly. I'm just always oscillating on the fact that do richer founders make better founders? I think that's a lot with investors.

• 4:20Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about it, do richer founders make better founders?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  I'd say yes. I think about this quite often. If you were to have a blank check VC fund and you just wrote a check blank, not looking at the idea, uncapped convertible note into every successful exited YC founder for their second company, you'd have probably one of the best VC funds on the planet. I look at some of the guys in my own YC class because that company I sold was in was in my Combinator. My second company was Dave, the founder of Open Door. He had a small real estate company he sold to. Truly a Stripe was in my class. They had sold a previous company for like $6 million, some eBay tools business. Amazing. The swing for the fences that some of the second time founders go for wants to have a little bit of money in their pocket, who otherwise were went a little bit more conservative the first time around.

• 5:06Harry Stebbings?

  I remember meeting Eric Glymon from Paribus at the time, just after he'd sold it to Capital One. And he was like, I'm about to start something in the fintech space. Anyway, I'll tell you more soon. And he then founded Ramp a month later.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Another good example.

• 5:22Harry Stebbings?

  Great example. Can I ask, what is that though? Is that like the financial safety that comes from having a first exit? Is that having seen mistakes that you've made before? What is it you think that gives you that unfair advantage on the second or third time?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  At least for me, I mean, probably the same thing for for guys like the for Paribus and a lot of people in my YC class. We weren't willing to swing for the fences, given how how little capital we were raising back then. So this company I started was in 2009, was the YC batch I was in, 2009 or 2010. And we had to fight tooth and nail to raise a $300,000 seed round. I mean, now you raised $300,000 in what every minute you're presenting at the YC batch announcement. But it was so difficult. I mean, Mark Cuban was our first check into that company. That wasn't even a result of Y Combinator. I had to try and convince him and convince him for a year to get this small amount of money.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And back then, Mark actually capped my salary at $30,000 a year until we could get the company profitable. Like, that's how different it was back then to raise capital.

• 6:24Harry Stebbings?

  Is that a good move, do you think? Like now that would be considered like vulture VC. I love Mark, you love Mark. I don't mean that badly on him, but that would be considered really bad form.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  There's no way that would happen again today, but honestly, it was an amazing forcing function to try and build a profitable business and not raise too much capital. We never actually raised any capital beyond the seed round as a result of that. So it taught us just a lot about persistence and perseverance to try and come up with a scalable business model without burning a lot of capital, without hiring a lot of people. And interestingly enough, the $30,000 salary cap led to me overdrafting my checking account a lot, which pissed me off enough to start Dave as my next company after this one. So in a funny way, it sort of led us to that. And then Mark ended up leading the the seed round for Dave as well. So it was really an interesting story.

• 7:10Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you not do Y C for Dave? You did it the first time. Why not the second time?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  We actually were willing to do it the second time. I'm not willing. I mean, we we would have liked to do it the second go around because it was so different. Yeah, back when I did Y C in in 2010, it was still Paul Graham and Jessica. Paul was still cooking us dinner in a crock pot, serving us like vegetarian chili on Tuesdays. Like it was a much smaller group. Mark Zuckerberg would come in and talk to, you know, 20 of us. You get the Google founders coming in. It was this really intimate experience, but it was also a different time when this angel investing was starting to gain momentum. Again, going back to how hard it was to raise the seed round, our demo day was very unsuccessful from a Y C standard perspective. And so to go back in and get a bigger check, mind you, the check size was only $17,000 back then for 6%,

• 7:58Speaker 01

  not whatever it is today. I think it's a couple hundred thousand dollars. So 17 grand bought them 6% of Stripe. Pretty impressive.

• 8:06Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, when you reflect on like the thing that you did very deliberately and strategically differently the second time with Dave, that you really think is a case of I learned my mistake or the lesson from last time and I applied it with Dave. What would you say that one or two things is?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  The difference this time around was really swinging for the fences on a bigger problem. I think the first time around, I was going for a niche business, something that I knew we could get profitable quickly. So from that sense, it was a little short sighted. We never could build a really massive business and we didn't want to raise a lot of additional capital either. One, because it was hard and two, I didn't like the idea of sitting behind a bunch of preferred equity. Given this was sort of like my nest egg, I knew that every dollar of cash that the company generated was 40% mine. And I really wanted to protect that. The second time around, I had some money in my pocket. I had a real bone to pick with a major industry. I looked at every major industry to try and go, tried to disrupt. Banking had the most personal pain point with.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And so I think the second time around was really just having a lot more confidence in myself, confidence in the ability to fail and go for a much bigger idea and going against the banks was sort of a, a perfect time with all this new technology coming out like Plaid that we were partnering with.

• 9:17Harry Stebbings?

  Given we had so many companies raised so much in 21 and 22, do you think we have a founders, a group of founders that are generally pretty fucked? Given the size of the pref stacks that they have to claw back to?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. The amount of capital that some of these companies have raised, a lot of them copycat companies too, like that never should have been getting capital. I mean, people, you should never go out and try and build a company as a copycat where you have no real skin in the game or no real bone to pick with the industry because these companies take a long time to build, like they take everything. And so it's weird to try and raise a bunch of money to go emulate something else we have no passion for. Just because it's a, the spur of the moment, it's the hot thing of, of the time. There's that issue. We have a lot of unpassionate founders. The second is because of the pref stack, it really kills their optionality. I mean, there's a lot of companies that we would have probably bought by now that are very small, but have raised a couple hundred million dollars of pref.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And so makes their inevitable outcome impossible.

• 10:15Harry Stebbings?

  There must be a time though, where that realization comes home to roost, so to speak. And when you say, I know you've raised 200, but I'll give you 20 and you'll be grateful. Does that time come?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  It will come. It just has not come yet. I still think people, there needs to be more time for the capital to burn. People need to actually run out of money for that to happen. And because of the amount of money that people raised, like they've been able to make it last much longer than otherwise in previous years past.

• 10:40Harry Stebbings?

  Who's the ones saying no, they're out of interest? Because like as a venture investor, I know how we operate. If you're not in my home run basket largely, you're kind of not interesting. And those companies that are kind of struggling to get to their pref stack, honestly, for venture investors, especially US minded upside maximization ones, they're just like, who gives a shit? Mistake, move on.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess we don't find a lot of VCs going around trying to sort of just get their money back because your industry is such a home home run hits driven business that it's not that interesting for them to try and break even on something. They're putting much more of their focus on the the 10 to 20x investments that actually can return the fund.

• 11:15Harry Stebbings?

  So it's the founders then who are saying, no, we need to bluntly get back to the pref stack and they're the ones turning down the offers.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 11:22Harry Stebbings?

  You've had so many interesting elements to the journey. One I really wanted to dig in on and one that I'm thinking a lot about. Why does anyone go public today in a world of extended private markets where we have such large capital supplies willing to come in and extend that window? Why does any private company want to go public today? How do you think about that?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Well, one, there's the dynamic of there's too much pref capital going out there, which I would argue is not great for founders. And so the benefit of being public is you erase all the pref. Today, we have no preferred equity on our cap table. We have no debt in our business. We we trade $100 million a day of volume, which means we have great liquidity to have employees get liquid on their their equity. It's a real rich person's not problem, but it's a rare air for companies like a Stripe to be in where they have a true public comp in an add in. There's really no point in them going public because they have such vast access to capital for secondary markets, but

• 12:20Speaker 01

  that's only a select few companies. If you can be one of those businesses and not have to be public because you have such a clear comp, you don't need to have the distraction to live with of being public, then sure. But I think that also works well if you're an enterprise business. If you're a direct to the consumer company like Dave, I think you leave a lot on the table. And for the potential retail swing that the investors can drive, but people that are really passionate. About your brand. Tesla, I'd argue, would not be a trillion dollar private company. But because of sort of the cult generation they've developed, the Tesla owners that buy the stock, I mean, they're the ones that have pushed it above and beyond any reasonable EBITDA multiple that they would be trading at as a private company. So I think it depends if you're enterprise or consumer and depends if you have great public comps or not.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And it also depends if you have that access to the capital markets that you do, which I'd argue very few companies have that luxury.

• 13:10Harry Stebbings?

  I completely understand that, hey, it's a game of the 1% who have the luxury to do that. I think there's actually an argument to be said that even a Stripe of the world would benefit from having the Prof stat removed. Something that's always questioned is the ability to make long-term bets if public, given the short-term nature of a lot of Wall Street. Do you feel as a public company CEO, you're able to make long-term investments that are best for the business in the long term, but might have material costs that aren't obvious in the short term?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I would say because of the turn down that we had to weather, our focus on longer-term bets, you know, certainly pivoted towards doubling down our core, our focus on our core product offering, making that best in class, improving the margins. And so a lot of our long-term focus on new products, you know, was overshadowed. We are now finally getting out of that now that the company is unicorn valuation again. We have real volume in our stock. We've gone through one of the most difficult times of my life to get us back here. And so we have some exciting bets that will ship later this year and into 2026 that we're excited about. But had that not happened, those product bets would have probably already be here in market today.

• 14:15Harry Stebbings?

  Going a little bit back from the turnaround, which we're going to cover. I mean, it's just such a wild story. You must look at it now and just go like, oh, my God, thank God I'm through.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Not enough time has passed, so I'd say, you know, I'm not feeling like we're through the woods yet.

• 14:30Harry Stebbings?

  You chose to SPAC. Why did you choose to SPAC versus traditional IPO? Help me understand that.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I still think that the concept, the structure of a SPAC still makes a lot of sense. You know, you, you get to raise a guaranteed amount of capital, at least through a, through the pipe, at a valuation that is set versus an IPO process. You don't really know how much capital you're going to raise. You don't even know. What valuation until you reach the market making process at the very end? And that's an arduous process, right? It's nine to 12 months of work to build the S1. Not to mention all the stuff you have to do to build out the finance, compliance, accounting functions to get there. If you're a younger company going public on the earlier side, the SPAC is an amazing vehicle to give you a lot of confidence. I know Murray's this much capital. I know it's this much dilution. And in our situation, we had a top tier investor that was meeting the pipe. We felt very comfortable.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  And if not for the quality, the lower quality of companies that went public via that vehicle, I think you would have seen this be a much more pervasive way for good companies to go out.

• 15:30Harry Stebbings?

  So if SPACs are actually a more functional and efficient mechanism than people give them credit for, why have they been so ridiculed? And I mean, today, obviously, we're both operating in this ecosystem. The word SPAC is almost a poisonous word. Why is it so badly tarnished?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Just the sheer amount of low quality companies that went public via that. I mean, access to capital was, when you went to this zero interest rate environment, when access to capital anyone could raise, you were having companies with barely any revenue, barely any business model that were going public via this structure. And it really overshadowed the great companies that went public that could have also done a traditional IPO. And I think we were one of those companies that we could have easily done a traditional IPO. SoFi could have done a traditional IPO. There are great businesses out there that went public via SPAC that didn't have to. And I think we need to sort of separate that out.

• 16:17Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we'll see a return to SPACs as a mechanism to go public, given their efficiency? And as you said, predictability of price?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  If you can get a high quality company to go out, to reset the stigma, I think you could possibly, you know, save that being a realistic way to go public. And it's honestly, it's too bad that it's gone away. Cause again, I think it is a, it is a real way to go out.

• 16:38Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything you would have done differently about the process when you review it now?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Honestly, I don't regret going out via SPAC. I think we just went public too late, to be honest. I mean, we saw them.

• 16:48Harry Stebbings?

  You went public too late?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Too late, too late. I think the company realistically was ready to go public probably six to 12 months earlier. And we were waiting. We wanted to find the right sponsor. We were trying to ensure a few things were right within our sort of. How we were forecasting our business and so we decided to wait a little bit longer. We went public January 2022. The market completely fell apart April 2022 before our lockup even expired. All of our pipe investors from our IPO bailed before our lockup expired. Fintech became a bad word. SPAC became a bad word. Unprofitable growth company became a bad word. We were sitting in the worst possible place of all time. Had I gone public nine months earlier, we would have had the chance to raise potentially more capital.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  We would have been able to turn over our earlier shareholders, bring more longer term capital. And like, we never would have gone to a $5 billion valuation of 50 million market cap overnight. It wouldn't have happened. We would have had actual insulated support with analyst coverage. We had nothing. We were just a sort of a sitting duck. You know, some call it like a fallen angel where you have no pathway back. Even if you build a good business, it was, it was tough times.

• 17:53Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, you are in the center of shit there. Respectfully, as you said, all the challenging elements coming together. I have to ask, you said about the pipe investors not being there. Does that not piss you off? And I mean that nicely, but like investors not being there to support you in the hard times is a frustrating thing when you have relationships and you kind of feel like you've earned it.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does piss you off. You know, I actually called some of these investors before going out and I said, hey, the market looks choppy. Why don't we do this as a private round? And their response was, don't worry, stock goes down, we're going to buy more. We're here to support you. And within a matter of weeks, they were out, I had no support in my stock. We were fucked and they had a decent amount to do that.

• 18:32Harry Stebbings?

  So we have this moment where we're like, okay, we're at the center of a load of challenging tailwinds. The stock goes from $4 billion on IPO to 50 million. Jason, that is unlike almost any other experience that a CEO will go through. What did your mindset tell itself? And how did you actually get through that? Just personally, forget the rah rah, the troops bullshit. Like, how did you cope every day?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, you can't look, you couldn't look. I mean, it was so depressing to see all this value that you had accrued a race overnight. A buddy of mine texts me over the situation and he's like, look, it was never real because you guys never even got to the lockup. You know, you never actually were. Possible to sell. By the time our lockup had expired, only six months after going public, the stock was already down 90% with no fault of our own, right? We had a ton of capital in the bank. We had a great business. And his response was, it was never real. So there's nothing you can really worry about. All you can think about is the path forward. And as a founder, that's all I could do was talk to the team about, we had this, this statement that we delivered to the company around patience and performance.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Like let's just keep our heads down. The best companies ultimately go public. If we perform and we're persistent, we're going to eventually see people turn around and start to buy the stock. Thankfully, it did. For me, I never started the company to make a lot of money. I started the company because I had, I believe in this mission to sort of level the financial playing field for everyday Americans paying all these overdraft fees in their account. I would advise any founder to really double down on having a very set mission for the company, because it's a really important way to recruit people to bring them into the company. Even when our market cap went down 98%, the amount of people that left the company during that time was so small because people weren't here to make millions of dollars. That's a byproduct of the mission being successful.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  What we did though, to incentivize people was we issued a bunch of performance stock units that were way out of the money. And I would say, look, market cap, market cap is 50 million bucks. If we get a stock price from $1 to $5 to $20 to $80 to 100, you're going to hit all these new targets. And I think we probably minted more millionaires at the company as a result of the performance stock units than we did in the actual IPO process. And so the people that did leave actually left a lot of money on the table because those performance units were quite valuable at the end of the day.

• 20:50Harry Stebbings?

  Does it make it mentally easier for you knowing that you couldn't sell? I had an IPO of one of our companies and similar to you, it was a SPAC and it went from eight billion to zero. It actually went to nothing, dude. But it was in the lockup. There's nothing I could do. It does actually make it a little bit easier for me because it wasn't an option. Does it make it easier in your head?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  That's, I think, the only thing that got me through it because it, it wasn't like there was a moment in time where I had the ability to just go get a hundred million dollars. Like it wasn't a realistic opportunity. I, I, I never had that because the stock dropped so quickly that there was never a chance.

• 21:24Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so sorry to be personal, but I think these things, and does a marriage suffer in those times? Like we hear work-life balance and you know, you have all of the bullshit that we hear today. That is the most intensely stressful time. Do you see that wear and tear on a marriage?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I've got a fantastic wife. She was incredibly supportive through the entire process. She always believed. She was actually a seed investor in the company. $50,000 check into the seed round. Those are only ever seed investment. So I think she's up like 100x on that particular deal, but she was a believer. She stuck by my side and I think the one benefit of being in LA, it's not a very tech-heavy hub. My golf club, my play, I had has no tech founders and so I was able to sort of escape and not sort of be surrounded by it at all times. I think also being a virtual company helped as well.

• 22:11Harry Stebbings?

  You said about solving the problem for everyday Americans. One thing I often think when I see a lot of funding rounds is wow, this is developers solving problems for developers in Silicon Valley. And I'm not belittling that. That can be a very big company. But do you think that Silicon Valley adequately innovates for a population that is much broader than purely them? Or do you think not?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Certainly when we started the company, no, it was so hard to raise capital for data. Even though we had these amazing results, going back to the concept I said earlier, where investors had never heard of an over-Jaff fee. Like that was a real thing for us to raise our series A, even though we had our CAC was $5. We had this amazing growth going on at the company. I think it took 120 meetings for our series A. That was back in 2017, 2018. So before like things really got crazy in venture, it was hard. People did not understand.

• 23:03Harry Stebbings?

  120 meetings for your series A?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And we ended up raising the series A entirely from one investor who it was actually more of a healthcare-focused fund. It was really just a result of one of our board members saying, trust me, this is a good idea. It's going to work. And he wrote us the check. Pretty interesting times.

• 23:20Harry Stebbings?

  What was the check and what was the price?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  It was $10 million on roughly 40 was the price. And we took that all the way to a billion-dollar valuation was our next round in our series B. And actually, we only raised 60 million in primary capital prior to going public. I mean, we were just incredibly capital efficient, always a small team. I kept that sort of profitability mindset always from my last business. We had this sort of good balance between profitability and growth. Yeah, 60 million to get to public.

• 23:49Harry Stebbings?

  It's the thing I really can't get my head around as an investor. I try and analyze patterns and I interview many, many great founders. And so many of the great founders from your UI past to your Klavios, to your service titans of the world, honestly, had exactly the same experience as you. Couldn't raise hundreds of meetings. And then there's the flip side, bro. It's like the hottest companies continue to be the hot companies and they go on this soaring trajectory that is unstoppable. I always try and think like, which is the, the more common path to success? One thing that was critiqued was the movement into crypto. How do you reflect and think about that in the pathway?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  We never really get asked about that. You know, I, I think at the time crypto, I, I still believe in the, the foundation of blockchain, the ability for things like stablecoin to move money. I still think there's inherent value in Bitcoin is doing to show, show stored value within digital currency. At the time though, the move was actually heralded. I mean, we had this big partnership with FTX. That's when our market cap reached its all time high was when we announced that partnership and they wrote us a hundred million dollar convertible check into the company. It was sort of boom time for crypto. It was boom time for Neo Bank. And thankfully we never actually went live with that partnership, but we wouldn't have launched it anyways because of the, the path to profitability. It was a distraction, which ultimately, you know, we had to sideline a lot of our initiatives to just double down on

• 25:07Speaker 01

  really AI was what we, we ended up moving more of our focus to.

• 25:10Harry Stebbings?

  I'm, I'm in deals with FTX now and they've been an absolute fucking nightmare to be blunt. Demanding cash back really being very difficult. Were they difficult with you in terms of needing cash back post SBF?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Well, our situation was a little unique because it was a convertible note. So we, we owed the money back no matter what. It wasn't an equity investment that they made into, into the company. And so we did benefit quite greatly from paying them back early. That note was not due until 2026 and I think it was last year, January, we paid them back $71 million as opposed to the, at the time a repayment would have been probably a hundred and nine or a hundred and 10 million. So a pretty accretive transaction. And I think that also sent this really strong signal to the market last year because we hadn't yet announced our first profitable quarter. And so when we were wanting to part ways with 70 million of cash, I think people realized that we were about to start to show some pretty explosive numbers.

• 25:58Harry Stebbings?

  In that period, before we move to the turnaround, which is just incredible, is there anything you did that looking back, you think strategically, I wish we hadn't done that?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Honestly, I think I would have rather just doubled down on the core product more closely from the onset of the IPO. I think we just have so much room to run in that core business. And the real unlock around how AI could impact our business, we started investing in AI years ago as a way for us to impact our underwriting. Now, Dave was a, we were a pioneer in cash flow based underwriting, the first company to partner with Plaid to access connected account information as a way to use for short-term credit underwriting. If that was the thing that we unlocked and AI ended up being the perfect solution to analyze cash flow data to underwrite risk for, for consumer

• 26:45Speaker 01

  credit and fade to 2025, we're down to nearly 1% loss rate, underwriting a younger slash subprime consumer for short-term credit. It's been pretty amazing. And we also now have 80% of our customer support inquiries are driven by AI. And so both of those things I would have much rather doubled down on versus going into things like crypto, which were not as core to the product to improve what we're doing for everyday Americans.

• 27:10Harry Stebbings?

  When we look at the turnaround, 50 million to now 1.13 billion as of today, I'm forgetting the date, but you know, this is recorded when it's 1.13 billion. There's kind of two ways to turn it around. Reduce cost, increase revenue. Business can be more simple than people think. When we look at the first reducing cost, what worked that you did strategically there to reduce costs so effectively?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  You know, there was the cleanup of some contracts, like we had some legacy agreements with our networks and our processors, which we, which we improved. All of our infrastructure costs, we could, we could improve. We fortunately never had to do any, any riff. The result of profitability was never because we had to lay people off. We were 300 people of the IPO. Dave was 300 people still today. The investments again in AI is really what led to a lot of the profitability, reducing our support costs considerably. But it was really the AI innovation within underwriting that unlocked a ton of leverage in the business.

• 28:07Harry Stebbings?

  We think about AI on underwriting and customer support. How has it changed the margin structure of customer support for you? You know, we always hear like, oh, AI changes customer support. And I'm always like, Great, cool. What's the actual impact?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Well, one, it's actually a better NPS score around the experience. If you want to talk to, typically, this would be the same for most banks, and especially neo-banks in the country. Most call center support is going to be offshore. That's going to take some time to get to. You can interact via chat, but mostly that support, they're looking at a FAQ list to derive the response. AI is able to quickly ingest all that, get you the answer you're looking for within a matter of seconds. And so we actually get better scores for a fraction of the cost. Because I think it probably costs us $2 to $3 per contact if someone wants to talk to an actual agent, at least. And so when you think about the cost reduction of someone interacting with an AI agent that costs literally nothing,

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that alone is going to be pretty impactful. We don't have an insignificant amount of people that are contacting support each month just to understand what their approval limit is. How do I access this part of the app? It's pretty, well, not pretty, it's very impactful.

• 29:16Harry Stebbings?

  Have you then removed people from customer support? Or just not hired new, supplemented existing? What does that allocation look like?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  We've always had an escalation team that sits domestically. That team's been the same size. But we've also, keep in mind, scaled our customer base 2X since then. So we've kept the same sized team. We have less reliance on the outsourcing because more has gone into the AI support. So there's been no staff reduction at the core team in the US, but it is less reliance on these offshore companies.

• 29:47Harry Stebbings?

  On the underwriting side, I actually met an underwriting AI company the other day, and they were selling to one of the biggest providers in Germany. And they were like, hey, you've got 180,000 underwriters. They're one of the biggest. Basically, we can get rid of them all in six months. And they looked at it and they were like, fuck, no way are we rolling this out. That's like recession in Germany because of this whole program. No way. When you think about how AI changes underwriting and what that actually means, how do you think about that?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  I've only been thinking about it in one way is what's the consumer benefit to this? And the benefit is more credit approvals and higher credit limits are approved because of AI. When you think of how we do it, Dave, if you want to access credit within minutes of joining our app, that's sort of our, you know, our, our key go to market for the company. Our ad, if you see an ad for Dave, it's get up to 500 bucks in five minutes or less. We can do that because a customer comes in, we have them link their existing bank account via Plaid. And Plaid gives us access to six months of a customer's past transaction history. We have 12 million connected accounts roughly on the platform at this point. And so 12 million accounts times six months of account history.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And then we get a connection on an ongoing basis. We have access to nearly a billion transactions. When we launched the business, it was just a rules based model, you know, when do you get paid? Our confidence, your ability to keep a positive balance over a certain amount of time. Our loss rates when we started the company were north of 10%. And at that time, we were only offering people $75 of credit, the average being around 50. You fade to 2024, at the end of the year, reported the average amount we're giving out is 180 and our loss rates are 1.2%. You think about the power of AI analyzing that cash flow data. It can look for commonalities in what makes up a good credit quality customer or a bad credit quality customer

• 31:38Speaker 01

  based on where you work, where you shop, even types of ATMs, are there clusters of fraud around certain types of areas? Like you can start to suss out areas of risk that a rules based engine would never be able to get to, that AI can quickly analyze. And because Dave were an overdraft product or an overdraft killer, the duration you're actually borrowing money from us for is very short. So you're going to utilize our product for five to 10 days on average. We're getting to maturity on the entire loan portfolio so fast that the AI is constantly able to teach itself what it did good and what it did bad versus, you know, a long-term installment loan company that may use AI, but they're not going to know the efficacy of that model until six to 12 months in. Our model actually

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Ears every couple of weeks. And so the power of that's resulted in more credit per user at lower loss rates. You generally see the opposite to job better loss rates. You usually have to pull down your credit limits. We've actually seen the divergence of that and it's really, really powerful.

• 32:38Harry Stebbings?

  I'm fascinated. You said that like it started at 10% loss rates moved down to 1.8. I think you said that.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Two, 1.2.

• 32:44Harry Stebbings?

  1.2. Was the industry average out of interest?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  I think north of 5% and it's huge. I mean, going back to the levers for profitability. When you are originating, I think we did 1.6 billion of originations in, in the fourth quarter. Every 10 basis points of loss rate is going to, is going to result in significant amount more margin into the business. And so we've been able to improve our gross margins on day from at the low point in 22, we were in sort of in the mid 40s. And our, our gross margins in Q4 were 72%.

• 33:14Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think like JP Goldman picked a, your biggest providers? Do you think they're able to incorporate AI efficiently and fast in a way that they will need to?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  It's just very different. I mean, how they would integrate AI, the way that it works for us. Our whole business revolves around having a very lean and digital first cost structure. When I think about how the incumbents are operating their business, they have a, they have a legacy problem. And you've heard the JP Morgan consumer CEO talk about this, Mary Ann, and that it costs them $300 per year just to break even on a basic checking account. And so if you're not a consumer that is using a Chase Sapphire card or has a mortgage or uses Chase private, private client. The only way they can make money off the younger consumers or the lower income consumers is by charging heavy minimum balance fees and heavy $35 overdraft fees.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  It's the only way to recoup your cost. When I think about a company like Dave, we have no bank branches. My annual cost to serve is nearly 40. And so I can offer a vastly superior product at a fraction of the cost and still generate 72% gross margins. Our checking account is free. We have no overdraft fees on the checking account. Our cost to access credit is only five bucks. If you want to borrow a hundred dollars a day. And so that experience compared to paying $35 for access to buying a cup of coffee on overdraft at a major bank is so vastly superior. And then that ultimately drives the low cost drives a low CAC because people tell their friends about it. And our acquisition is 30% word of mouth. So it drives this flywheel that I don't think the big banks would ever be able to catch up to.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And I think they will ultimately seed on the lower incoming younger consumer. And instead you're seeing the bigger banks doubling down on more of the private wealth, higher end clientele. Where I would say the banking system is actually quite good in this country. It's really for the 50% of Americans that are earning less than $100,000 a year. Pay to paycheck overdraft in their account a lot. They're the ones that should not be banking with the incumbents because it's just too expensive.

• 35:20Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I'm a VC, I'm paid to surmise very grandiose statements from little data and project it with a lot of confidences. When I think about that, the kind of common statement is this, and it's simple. Banking for poor people is a bad business. Is that wrong?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I think people had that stigma early on when the company was burning capital. But we developed a really, this is part of sort of the turnarounds. I don't want to sort of jump the gun on the story here, but we developed a very crisp message to the street, which was that I would advise any founder to figure this out for themselves is you're building a highly scalable technology platform. At what point, whether it's a user metric, a revenue metric, does your platform actually become profitable? Because what is so great about technology companies, you should have a lot of operating leverage built into your business. It doesn't need infinitely more people to support infinitely more customers, right? And so we have this message to investors and to the company as well, that once Dave reached 2.1 million monthly paying members, that the platform would reach profitability.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And every member that we added thereafter, because we didn't need to add more headcount to service the next 2.1 million monthly paying members, we would reach significant profitability. And so when we hit that number in Q4 of 23, we had our first $10 million of EBITDA in a profitable quarter. We've since compounded user growth through 2024. We had 2.5 million monthly paying members in Q4 of 24 and we generated 33 million of profitability and fade to 2025, we've guided for the year to achieve 110 to 120 million of profitability. And so you really start to see the, the teeth of the operating levers built into these businesses. And so banking for, I wouldn't call it poor people. I'd say banking for people poorly served by incumbent

• 37:04Speaker 01

  banks is an amazing opportunity because you can bank them with a highly scalable, highly efficient platform that is inexpensive to, to operate because of that drives very efficient CAC. And so it's actually an amazing business and most people missed it, except people like Imran that put money in at the, at the moat.

• 37:21Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. People often say to me, Harry, are you sure you're not Israeli? Because you have the directness of an Israeli in an English voice. So I'm sorry for the directness there on that one. And there are economies of scale that make the business better. I think about Seven Powers. It's the best book that anyone can ever read on business. And it basically states seven powers that create sustaining defensibility in a business. And one of them is economies of scale. Essentially, the more that is used, the better it gets, so to speak. And there are economies of scales that's where at 10 million, you're able to offer better X, more Y because of scale.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  That I would point again back to the underwriting. So because of the high velocity of this extra cash product where people are borrowing money for a very short period of time with Dave, we've actually issued that product 130 million times at this point. People use it 130 million times. So the more that the system actually sees those positive repayment behavior, you're going to ultimately start to be, see better loss rates and that results again in higher credit limits per user. And so it drives this flywheel of success. And so there's absolutely an economy of scale. And with all of our service providers and our, our networks, the more customers that we get on the platform, the cheaper our cost to serve actually gets. And so it enables longer term profitability there too.

• 38:35Harry Stebbings?

  I, I have to think as an investor about distribution of gains and outcomes in any given market. And I had Nick from Revolut on the show and he said that kind of the next generation would see really the consolidation of banking providers. Five global banking providers absolutely dominate and be trillion dollar companies. You'd see the Removal of kind of localized banking and these kind of global players would dominate. Do you agree with that statement on the consolidation of banking providers and five or six taking the majority of market share?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I don't know about five or six players. I do think, though, that there's an interesting time for someone to build a global neo bank. And I think Revolut is doing a really nice job with the new banks trying to do something similar where because you have these digital first tech stacks and you have banking as a service built into more and more countries, Plaid is now in 14 countries, you can start to build these sort of global banks. And then with things like Bridge and Stripe with sort of this innovation around stablecoin, you can start to get rid of sort of this cross-border currency friction that doesn't exist and you could finally build a global bank. I just don't see a major incumbent like a Chase or a B of A doing that, but I could see a digital bank taking that on and being quite successful.

• 39:46Harry Stebbings?

  The thing I didn't understand is US shits on Europe, really in everything, let's be honest, in terms of size, size of company, size of market cap, size of people. And my question to you is not in banking. Again, Revolut is $60 billion now. I don't know what Chime is quite, but it's what 15 to 20? What? Help me understand genuinely. I never get this. Why is the US smaller when it comes to neo banks than Europe?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, so I'm sorry to cut you off, but I mean, it really is the different markets that we're serving. And so I think I said earlier in the call, the banking market for people making over $100,000 a year, if you keep enough money in your checking account, if you have a pretty good credit score, banking is not so bad. You have access to pretty good products, pretty inexpensive products, that you have access to a mobile application to manage your money. You can get access to a financial manager. Like, it's not bad. It's the poorly served customer that's not making $100,000 a year, that is not able to maintain that minimum balance. That's the market to disrupt in the US. It is a massive one. I can't say what Chime is worth at this point, but Revolut is going after a different market.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  You look at some of the countries are super successful and they're going for markets where like the main banks don't even have a mobile app yet. Like, they're actually becoming the first kind of digital first mobile application. For a broad swath of consumers there. If you go talk to Nubank, they're not actually banking the lower income consumer in the country. Like banking is actually screwed up for everybody. If you were to talk to David Nubank CEO, he's going to tell you that his customer base in Brazil and Mexico is actually a middle to higher income consumer. It's just a very different opportunity that Austin Chime are disrupting in the market where there is just this systemic legacy issue of how the banks are not built to serve the the lower income population well here in the US. And that's still a massive opportunity. And could one of us be a $60 billion company? Like certainly.

• 41:38Harry Stebbings?

  But that's interesting because that's kind of contrarian in the way that most people think legacy banking providers globally, but in the US as well, actually don't provide that good a service. It takes a long time for them to respond. The customer service is not great. Quality of like ancillary products isn't great. When you look at a lot of what Revolut does from stock trading to crypto trading to insurance, to eSIMs, to travel insurance. These are like financial super apps versus a Chase or a Bank of America. You're saying that actually, no, they're pretty good.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  They're actually pretty good. And I think about the go to markets that Revolut is solving for, sort of the cross border currency friction. Like that doesn't, that's not really a thing in the, in the US. Like the need to open up an account very quickly on a, you know, on a mobile app. Like we have that here in the US. It doesn't exist in a lot of the countries that places like Revolut is disrupting. And you've, you've seen a lot of the European companies try and be successful here in the US. They haven't. I mean, they've consistently tried to come here and retreated because their product offering is just not a fit for the US, at least in the, the way they go to market in these other countries. Just to show you how different the, the two companies are.

• 42:40Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, Revolut is going for the banking license in the US as we speak and going full on to get the US. Do you think they'll be able to?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  It depends how they're going to try and attack the market. But we have not seen this sort of super app mentality be successful here the way it's been successful in other countries where there's just a lot less competition, I would say.

• 43:00Harry Stebbings?

  If you were advising Nick, say I'm Nick, and I said, you know, Jason, I'm not going to put on his accent because he'll kill me and I sound like a Bond villain. But you're advising me, I'm entering the US market in three to six months. What should I know? And do, having your advice, having seen all you've seen.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  I would just look at all the different types of customer segments and pick the one that is the most poorly served by the existing, the existing competition. I think companies like Dave have done a great job in Chime to build a significant penetration in the market. We're at 12 million customers. Chime, I think, is, you know, had a similar type of penetration. Cash App's done a good job. They've got 50 million people using their product. Like, he would have to think about this population, something that he needs to build an attractive product for, because I think it's going to be an uphill battle. Unless he wants to spend 500 bucks on customer acquisition, then maybe he could go after the, the incumbents.

• 43:50Harry Stebbings?

  I specialize in asking basic questions. You mentioned they're having the same customer bases as, in terms of volume or number, as like a Chime. Why are Chime more valuable then?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  We've just taken a very different approach to building our, our businesses. Our focus for Dave has been building a sort of a credit-first media bank. You can download our app. We specialize in AI underwriting to get you approved for credit within five minutes of joining. Chime's taken a very different approach, being very methodical about wanting to be your primary bank. They want to make sure that if you have any value in their product, that you'd need to be a direct deposit member of their app. And we just find that to be a, a very expensive value proposition to sell to consumers, because in my view, people don't wake up in the morning excited to open up a new checking account. It's very cumbersome to go switch all your bills over, figure out who you need to pay. It's a new, strange bank relationship. Whereas with Dave, we get to know you and try to get you to switch over time.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I'm going to give you approved for a couple hundred bucks when you join. We give you the Dave debit card to, to try us out. We're going to give you some benefits to help you earn some extra money if you take a few surveys here and there. And then we're going to ask you to direct deposit over time. But my CAC is $16 because I take this speed of value approach where I want to make you a happy customer immediately. Chime's taken a very different approach where it's a no-fee account. They're very conscious this is a bank account you're opening and that they want you to be a, a long-term user, or this may not be for you.

• 45:15Harry Stebbings?

  It's so funny though, you're more common or similar to Revolut than you think, because that's exactly the Revolut approach. And we had, you know, obviously Nick on and he says, no, I want it to be like a snack. I want you to use it for your holiday and go, I like this. And then your second holiday, I like this even more and it's good. And to your point, it's a lower crack when the entry point is that. And over time, you have more and more snacks and it becomes the meal. And you actually then move as a result of that. And it's kind of an entry wedge into the real win.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  That's our approach. I think if you want to raise a couple of billion dollars and spend a couple of billion dollars on marketing, you can do this direct deposit. And I think Chime's done a good job. They've, they've raised the most capital. They put the most capital to work. Again, we got to IPO with 60 million of primary capital because we've taken that snackable approach to build this relationship. But I also think from a long-term competitive advantage between us and the neo-banks, the data set we're building around this AI underwriting is going to be such a leg up when we start to get into additional forms of credit. I think we're so early on in our monetization as a business, given we just offer basic checking and an overdraft product called Extra Cash. But if we want to get into any other forms of lending, we have such an advantage by using this AI cash flow data.

• 46:26Harry Stebbings?

  What form of lending do you not do today that you would like to do that would be most transformative?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  We see a lot of overlap with things like buy now, pay later. We know our customers aspire for that. Our Extra Cash product, because it's so short duration, people tend to use that for gas, groceries, rent. But if you wanted to buy an airplane ticket or books for school or a t-shirt, like these discretionary items, people are not using Dave for that, at least from a credit perspective. And we like to think that we can be there for you in every potential point in your credit journey as a, as a customer.

• 46:58Harry Stebbings?

  What's your boldest bet on the future of the neo-banking ecosystem in the US? When you look forward to the next three to five years, what do you think is very clear that many other people don't see?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  The big thing people miss was the, the inherent operating leverage built into these fintech platforms. Like they're so scalable, especially with AI. And so as these neo-banks start to compound user growth beyond what it costs to pay back the cost to build their platform, there's just, these are great businesses. So I think people really miss that. It's, that's one. And then two, the ability for the neo-banks to get deeper into credit and use their expertise there to disrupt the legacy. Costs there because there's just still such expensive credit for consumers out there. Compounding interest credit cards are terrible for consumers. They're incredibly expensive. They're not great products. If you use them to buy things for long duration and you're just paying off a minimum balance, the fees you're paying are massive and it's like $3 trillion of credit card debt

• 47:52Speaker 01

  sitting out there that people are just revolving and paying too much money for. So I'd love to think that neo-banks can leverage their low CAC and their cheap operational structure to start to eat into the fee structures that the bigger banks are also getting fat on.

• 48:06Harry Stebbings?

  Final one before we do a quick fire. Is Trump better for business owners than a Biden administration?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:13Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Well, just his approach to less regulation in general. Again, this is less of an overhang for companies just to focus on building true innovative products without the need to constantly feel like they're going to trip some government wire. And I don't know that the government really understands this customer base and you see the things that they try and push forward like 10% cap on credit card APR. Like, do you realize what that would do to credit card approval rates? Like, the reason why people charge what they do for risk is because there's risk. And the second you take away someone's ability to monetize just means they shrink the funnel. So it's like, great job, you capped rates, you just kicked a bunch of people out of the credit card ecosystem and now they've gone to like go take out payday loans or something. It's just not a, it's such a headlined win for a regulator

• 48:58Speaker 01

  that doesn't actually take in mind the end consumer. The same thing goes for around trying to cap overdraft fees. What I said about the JP Morgan CEO around the, the cost to serve statement, that was directly related to, if you get rid of overdraft fees, we're just going to jack up the cost to maintain a monthly account with us because we need to recoup our cost to serve somehow. And so it's another one of those like regulator wins where, great, you know, headline, no more overdraft fees, but guess what? The banks have now increased costs for a monthly account fee and now no one gets approved for overdraft, which is a lifeline for everyday people to go get gas and groceries. It would suck to get stuck at the gas station just because a government regulator wanted to get a headline win when I needed this money. Like, screw you.

• 49:41Harry Stebbings?

  I saw the 10% APR and I was like, I don't know if they actually Understand how this world works, you're going to get like loan sharks who are really dodgy, having thriving businesses because of your regulation.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Trump's going to help get rid of that. We just need to get rid of the grandstanding and really try to think about what is going to be the best thing for the end consumer. And that's where I go back to, there's enough competition in this space where you can't screw the consumer because they have, they have enough options.

• 50:07Harry Stebbings?

  I want to move into a quick fight, Jason. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13Harry Stebbings?

  What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

• 50:16Speaker 01

  The one thing that we, that I probably regret as a founder in sort of this, this business was with venture capital dollars, the big push to hire seasoned pedigreed C-suite executives. Not as easy as it sounds, very difficult. I would really question every founder who's trying to over hire too fast in the C-suite, be very careful who you bring into your close circle.

• 50:37Harry Stebbings?

  That's so interesting. So would you not hire them at all and you grow internally or just wait for later?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  There's scaling issues by having some of your junior team try and get into more senior positions, positions over time. I would just be careful how you meet these people, get to know them over time, don't make rushed decisions and just be sure that they truly align with your culture and your vision. Cause they can be very disruptive to your culture, but they also can be very disruptive when they leave because people don't like seeing C-suites leave. So it's a very important decision. I don't think pedigree should be your necessary filter because one company success does not mean it's going to be successful for you.

• 51:13Harry Stebbings?

  Which competitor do you most respect and what do you take from them?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  I would say a lot of respect for what Revolut's doing. I think their, I'd almost call like regulatory as a service. Their ability to just go into these different countries and set up operations is pretty remarkable. I mean, if I could snap my fingers and repeat that capability, I think our products are needed in more than just the US. But the superpower they have to be able to go in all these countries and do that quickly, I think is pretty impressive.

• 51:40Harry Stebbings?

  You can buy and hold one stock for 10 years. What stock do you buy other than Dave?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I haven't looked at the most recent stats on just overall retail penetration, but I think Amazon is still pretty small when it comes to owning the overall retail market. I still think that's. It's a pretty good stock to own for for 10 years. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I'd say more 24 months, but you know, the shift to profitability was probably the only thing I thought about for for a solid two years. And how have you changed your mind? Sorry. It's just a philosophy shift in doing that. When you're going from a growth at all costs mentality, which everyone's pushing you for, to go to a profitability at all costs. Like it's such a major mind shift. It's such a shift for the entire company. That was probably the hardest thing and the most most thoughtful thing we've had to do over the last couple of years. Which consumer brand do you respect the most?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Apple. Aside from maybe their delay on AI, they just build the most polished consumer product and they have a great, well-respected brand. I think it's, uh, everyone, I think aspires to reach the level of polish that Apple has been able to to develop. Was the biggest short in the public markets? I don't feel comfortable asking answering that one as a public company CEO. I do not like short sellers and so I don't want to give them any any ammo. Do you not think any functioning, efficient market has to have a short seller? I think the ways in which they derive their profits are not always above board. And so maybe it it helps drive a an efficient market if there's the capability of shorting. But I think if you had a long only stock market, it wouldn't look terribly different. How do they derive profits badly?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Uh, well, you'll see some companies, they'll get these short reports that people put out where an analyst is out there, you know, similar to a a sell-side analyst. They're actually writing research on a company to get people to to short it. And oftentimes those facts are incorrect. Their assumptions, their, they can be blown out of proportion for things that, again, are just for for purely for profit. That's it. Is that legal? Isn't that like misinformation to change economic activity? I believe is legal. I mean, I I think if, as long as you're not saying a blatant lie about the business that could be deemed sort of defamation, which is hard to prove. You see big companies, I think most interesting was the one of Hindenburg being shut down. They've written short reports on places like Square, Cash App, and they decided to exit the business, which I thought was kind of interesting.

• 53:55Harry Stebbings?

  We just had Kovana CEO on the show. I actually skirted that one. I was like, I'll leave that for another day. I wanted to build the friendship. It's not the most friendly start, is it? Like, what did you think of Hindenburg?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a great earthquake.

• 54:07Harry Stebbings?

  Final one. Where is Dave in 10 years' time? You said you've got 12 million today?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  We've got 12 million today. I'm not committing to some sort of a user target, but Dave is going to be much more prominent in your credit life than it is today. I think I alluded to this, but I really feel strongly that our our company is is very early on in its monetization journey today, given we have a three-year-old checking account business. We have a 10-year-old extra cash, short-term credit business, and our ability to continue to grow those two parts of the business, plus adding new capabilities on credit to add to those those opportunities, I think are just massive, massive things for the company. So Dave in 10 years has multiple credit products. We are more of the primary bank for for the vast majority of our consumers, and it's just going to be a much bigger business because of the operational levers we talked a lot about today.

• 54:54Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, listen, I so appreciate you putting up with the direct questions. You've been fantastic. I'm such a fan of the incredible journey. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Great to meet you.

• 55:07Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what an incredible discussion. The story of Dave is the biggest turnaround in the public markets, I think, of the last 24 months at least. I want to thank Jason for being so open in that discussion. If you want to watch the show, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion-dollar startup requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Now, at 20VC,

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• 57:56Harry Stebbings?

  It helped them scale globally, saving him 30 hours a month and letting him focus on building great games instead of doing boring admin. Plus, you can offer benefits like 401k, health insurance and workers comp. Just for listening today, you also get three months free. Go to gusto.com/20vc. That's gusto.com/20vc. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Thursday. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin and me, shooting the shit on the biggest news, financings, IPOs in technology. Always so much fun doing the three of us.