"World of DaaS"
deep dive into Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) businesses. World of DaaS is a podcast for data enthusiasts, by data enthusiasts, where Auren Hoffman talks to business and technology leaders about all things data - building it, acquiring it, analyzing it, and everything in between.
"World of DaaS"
Daffy CEO Adam Nash - Data and Design in Fintech
Adam is the co-founder & CEO of Daffy, a fintech platform for charitable giving. Prior to Daffy, Adam was CEO of Wealthfront, VP of Product & Growth at Dropbox and VP of Product Management at LinkedIn.
In this episode of World of DaaS, Auren and Adam discuss:
- Trends that will dominate fintech in 2030
- Financial giants & disruptors
- Tax strategies and donor advised funds
- Most common product management mistakes
Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Adam Nash on X at @adamnash.
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Hello Data Nerds. Welcome to World of DaaS. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, ceo of Safegraph and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes. Get weekly data as a service news at worldofdascom, that's spelled world of D-A-A-Scom. Hello fellow Data Nerds. My guest today is Adam Nash. Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Daffy, a fintech platform for charitable giving. Prior to Daffy, adam was the CEO of Wealthfront. He was the VP of Product and Growth at Dropbox, the VP of Product Management at LinkedIn. He's also an adjunct professor at Stanford teaching personal finance. Adam, welcome to World of Daffs. All right, glad to be here, really excited Now. You wrote this super interesting blog post five years ago called FinTech 2025. We're almost six months away from that happening and you wrote about five major trends that will dominate FinTech for the next five years. Now that we're very close to 2025, how are those trends spared so far, boy?
Adam Nash:2025 seemed further away in 2020 than it does now. I think I was right on the trends and I think I was just too aggressive, as usual, about the kind of movement of the market, some of which, of course, I probably underestimated how much dislocation would happen in the venture community post-pandemic. When I wrote this in 2020, it didn't feel like the venture ecosystem would be impacted that much. If anything, it was booming, but obviously with the change in rates and the entire environment, I think some things have slowed down, but especially fintech funding in general has really come off the cliff.
Adam Nash:That's right and I think it's coming back, but I think it's been a rough couple of years for a lot of founders and teams to right size. But the trends that I identified you remember this too, oren. Yeah, a lot of it was the lessons that came from the transition from Web 1.0, which ended with the bubble bursting, and then what gave birth to Web 2.0? And I was thinking about what we just went through as a FinTech 1.0 cycle.
Adam Nash:Yes, I know there was FinTech before, but you know FinTech 1.0 is saying like well, what changed and the three that I picked up on that I'm still a big believer in is that one. A lot of the products in the first wave of FinTech were very derivative of real world products. We just moved them online.
Auren Hoffman:Right, you could trade stocks with your broker on the telephone and now you can go online and do it, or something.
Adam Nash:That's right, and so looking for novel features and products that couldn't exist before, before you moved online. The second trend was moving away from just every product being focused on millennials to basically focusing on other generations. The pandemic accelerated tech adoption. Everyone got comfortable doing things remotely. Even my parents, who are in their 70s, deposit their checks and run their business mostly online now, and so I was looking for that. And then, of course, third, really looking for multiplayer products, moving from single player. I think one of the big differentiators you get online is that it's meant to connect people, not just information and products and services. To connect people, not just information and products and services, and so we saw this with Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but I've been looking a lot for fintech applications that uniquely involve multiple people. I got a taste for this at Wealthfront, of course, because obviously, when you're talking about financial advice, you tend to be talking to a household which is more than one person, not just a single individual.
Auren Hoffman:Got it. So multiplayer at least means it could be two people rather than one or something it can be, but I think there's an exciting ramp.
Adam Nash:I mean, most financial institutions are still locked into having a single account, individual account or a joint account. Maybe it's a fancy thing like a trust account, but native services and features that tie people together I just find very interesting. What's a good?
Auren Hoffman:example of something multiplayer which is more than two people in the fintech world.
Adam Nash:I think there's a bunch of examples, and you see them across the space. Obviously, anything that lets people talk and communicate and interact with each other feels more multiplayer. You're obviously seeing that around stock trading, but I'll give you an example One startup that I love. The feature they launched was hey, there's a lot of people who have older relatives or parents or grandparents and they're always worried about them financially doing something with their money, getting fraud talked into something. What if you could install an app or a service where it monitors that older member of the family's accounts and if anything unusual happens, you get a notification. Okay, got it. What a fantastic product. It's not totally obvious why that wouldn't fit in the existing world, except the entire existing financial services industry isn't structured to connect people that way, and so I mean Daffy my current organization, of course, built this in from the get-go. Giving is naturally a little bit social.
Auren Hoffman:So you could share. Okay, I gave to this charity. Share it with the world, share it with a small subset of people, share it with whoever, or let's get a goal together. Let's try to get $20,000 to this organization, so back in the day you'd have those thermometers and stuff.
Adam Nash:That's right. Donor advised funds have been around for decades almost 80 years and yet they're still treated almost like bank accounts. One of the most popular features we rolled out this past year has been campaigns, so that anyone with a donor advised fund can actually run a matching campaign, dollar for dollar, for any charity they want to support. That's cool, and so that's a classic example of campaigns have existed before. Donor advised funds existed before, but in software you can bring these ideas together and actually create new experience and new ways to give.
Adam Nash:So our members love it because, oren, if you wanted to donate a certain amount to charity instead of donating to charity, you could say, oh, I could double the impact by running a campaign. Instead of giving $1,000, I could do a matching campaign and raise $2,000. And so our members love it. It brings more people into DAFI. They connect around causes and organizations they care about. So I think that actually, these are the types of features we're going to see more and more of. But I just want to have a little humility here. I think it's going to maybe not 2025, maybe 2028. I think it's going to maybe not 2025, maybe 2028,. I think it's going to take a few more years for this to roll through, but I'm already seeing it in the seed stage series A community of features.
Auren Hoffman:If you had to predict now five years FinTech, 2030, what are some trends that you're excited about that haven't yet taken off?
Adam Nash:I'm actually going to sound like a broken record here because I've been talking about this more for 10 years. I really do think there is some demographic influence on financial services. Most financial products tend to be pretty sticky. It's a trust-based business. People don't like to shift it around, and so I think what happens when you have a generation like the millennials rolling through that's so large? You have this huge supply of young people who don't have that brand affiliation and, to the Clay Christensen example, they're not the best customers of the existing firms, they don't have as much money at, etc. And so you get a lot of point products, which is what we saw in this last boom. One off this is a better bank account, this is a better spending card, this is a better investing account, a better advisor. This happened before in the 70s and 80s, with the baby boomers coming through, and you saw a lot of new brands come to the fore, old brands reposition. But then what happened?
Adam Nash:The next decade is, as the boomers aged, you started seeing consolidation. I want to get all my financial products and services from one area, and so now we've seen new entrants really get to amazing scale. We have fintechs with millions of customers. I was on the board of Acorns for six years. Millions of people are using Acorns to make their financial life better. Coinbase has tens of millions of customers, robinhood has tens of millions of customers, and so, if you follow the pattern, which should also happen in the next decade is some of those new entrants are going to become the new Fidelity's and Schwab's and Vanguard's, anchored around these large customer bases that they already have, who trust them, and some of the older incumbents aren't going to make the transition. They may merge or get acquired. There may be different aspects, but I'm expecting that kind of consolidation phase to happen, at least at the very high end, and I think we're going to see a lot of the new players play a role in that.
Auren Hoffman:In the financial services companies that are focused on consumers, that are working with consumers, very few of them have high market share. Most of these industries are quite distributed. They're quite diverse. Even banking, no one has 20% plus market share or something Lending just go through the list Whereas on B2B, you have a lot of maybe services that could have 40, 50% market share, Maybe Visa being the one exception to all of this. Why is that the case, At least in the US? Why is there not as much concentration like there are in some other industries?
Adam Nash:Well, I think there's a number of reasons for that, but I'm glad that you brought up the United States. I think the United States is a bit unusual as a market. Most countries find it very convenient from a regulatory and governance standpoint to have a very small number of very large institutions. Yeah, some of them just have four banks, that's right. Three or four banks. Most countries where there's clear number one, we have like 3000 banks. Regulators work closely with them, policymakers, they want to see something happen. Some of the stuff happens explicitly, some of it happens implicitly.
Adam Nash:But the US, due to its unique heritage and background, actually has always had a huge number of financial institutions. I mean even to the point where in the US, most Americans find it fairly normal that a bank and a brokerage are different. Things Like where I go to invest might be different than where I go to open a checking account or a savings account, whereas in the rest of the world most of that regulatory structure has pushed all that together into several large institutions. Some of that is happening in the US. The big guys really are getting bigger.
Adam Nash:But I think the reason there's so much opportunity is, frankly, it's just the market is incredibly large, it's very liquid and it's trusted. Remember, money is a trust business. The amount of anxiety that the average American has about opening an account or using a new provider is actually quite high compared to most countries, their willingness to try something new, to open a checking account with a new brand that they've heard about from a friend, etc. But this goes back into the history of if you go across states and localities of the US having not a couple dozen banks but thousands, and constantly new banks, regional banks, new services, new advisory Every time there's innovation in financial products, you get new entrants, etc. I actually hope that that culture continues. I think that at its heart it makes the US an incredible place to actually build new financial services and products, with the advantage as a startup, when you have limited time, the ability to actually get to some reasonable scale quickly enough that investors keep funding the journey to build something of real importance and scale.
Auren Hoffman:Now in the fintech sector in the 2010s, we just saw this big unbundling you mentioned earlier. What is Robinhood for stock trading? A firm for point of sale lending? We've got Coinbase, chime Stripe all these different companies that are focused on very, very, very specific things. Are we going to have a rebundling at some point, or what does this all mean for both the startups and the powers that?
Adam Nash:be. It's actually very interesting from my point of view because in some ways I think we're going to see a split. It's not going to be a single distribution, it'll be a little bit bimodal.
Auren Hoffman:It's like JP Morgan will be a place where you can get everything, and then there'll be all these point solutions somewhere else.
Adam Nash:I think you're going to be able to get everything from Acorns and Chime, robinhood, I think, coinbase. So I think the really big horizontal players are going to keep expanding and adding more products and services and, of course, the incumbents are going to respond by making sure to continue to upgrade their services as they need to. But I also think that the point product or the entry isn't going to go away, and the reason is that we've learned so much about these business models and how to build these businesses and, like I said, the market is big enough because of the interconnectivity that we built out in this first boom Plaid, all these ways of moving money around. I cannot tell you how hard it was in the early days of Wealthfront to open an account. When I opened my Wealthfront account, I had to mail in a check oh, wow, a physical check. I had to mail in a check Whereas now we all take for granted the fact that, using Plaid or a number of other services, you can link an account.
Adam Nash:Everyone knows what ACH is, they know how to do wires, you know all these things, and so I think that that's actually had an effect on the consumer, where there's an assumption that these different products will work together. One of the reasons you can have a neobank is because, if you have your paycheck deposit into acorns and that's what you use as your primary banking or a wealth front, et cetera, consumers assume that they can link that account and pay their bills with it and do everything they need to do with any other bank account, and so I think some of the barriers and friction of money moving around that existed in the incumbent universe pre-fintech has gone away, making point products more viable. And then, of course, we haven't even begun to talk about crypto and everything that's going on there, which still has a lot of interesting potential from my point of view.
Auren Hoffman:Speaking of moving money around in Europe. I'm not a fan of generally European regulations, but they have this regulation that basically makes it really easy to move your money and, kind of off, your accounts move from one to another. What do you think about government tipping the scale and trying to help some of this inter-movements and stuff?
Adam Nash:I do think the government has a good role to play around standards. I was going to make a joke in here. I do hear that the European sunscreens are better I just came back from vacation that sort of thing but no, I think that there's some great innovation happening in fintech in Europe. One of the companies I was an advisor for, raisin, has built an amazing business just around providing a marketplace where the European Union came together with common banking regulations, deposit coverage, etc. But you still had a situation where it was hard for someone in Germany to open up a bank account in Spain, exactly Even if the Spain account was paying a higher interest rate and they were both UBS accounts. It was hard to do and Raisin has now built I think they crossed over 60 billion in Euro deposits. That's probably an old number it's probably larger now.
Auren Hoffman:So you have Revolut, you have Adyen, NewBank, all these great European companies that came out through.
Adam Nash:Yeah, of course, so many. But I do think where the government can help a lot is basically helping to enforce whether through standards or regulation interoperability. If it was up to the big guys, the big banks they consider everything with their customer relationship proprietary There'd be no account linking. They don't want to share any data. They consider that their proprietary advantage. But that's very anti-consumer and it makes it very difficult.
Adam Nash:You get trapped in these services, and so I think an incredibly positive role for government and regulators to play is to ensure that for moving money around, for customer information, privacy is important, security is important, but in the end, the customer should be the top priority. If I want to move my money between one institution or another, if I want to move my stock account, that should be easy to do. I should be able to connect these things together, because most of our financial lives involve multiple institutions, involve multiple relationships, and I think the government, by making it easier to do that and have transparency into where your money is and how it's moving, and making it easy to do, they build trust in the system. I can trust providers more and it makes the market more competitive so you don't get incumbents basically just collecting rents.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah. Or are they coming with a teaser rate to keep the rates lower than they should, or all these other types of things?
Adam Nash:Oh, I wish it was just the teaser rate. I don't they coming with a teaser rate to keep their rates lower than they should or all these other types of things. Oh, I wish it was just the teaser rate. I don't think it's a teaser rate. I have accounts at big banks. I have accounts at a lot of different places and there are still bank accounts paying 0.01%.
Auren Hoffman:Correct Most checking accounts still today pay that. That's right.
Adam Nash:Why? Because they want to keep the money for themselves. That's it.
Auren Hoffman:Why? Because they want to keep the money for themselves. That's it In the SBB world, where one of the things that I don't think they appreciated was how easy it was to move money, especially for your business. How should these companies now need to start thinking about that side of things? Because it could be good. You could be the beneficiary. Certainly, in that case, the fintech mercury was the beneficiary of the money movement, but it also can leave you very, very fast if people lose trust.
Adam Nash:Yeah, no, I think this has existed for a long time. The great thing about working in financial services is that money has been around for a while and there's plenty of incentives for people to figure out how to get customers and build a business and build products. So most products and solutions or ideas have been tried in one way or another maybe not with modern technology or capabilities, but have been tried. But, yeah, I mean, everyone's going back to even the early days of the internet and online banks. The idea of hot money, of if you offer an account and you play the high interest rate game that if you acquire those customers, they can leave just as fast as they came to you. Someone else offers 0.1% more and they go, and retirees were actually famous for this. I remember my grandmother sitting out literally in the 90s and how quickly. If you're over 70, you don't have as many penalties for moving money out of CDs et cetera, and so the ability to hot shop and just be retired. What else are you doing? Totally, so my grandmother would do this Might as well. Get an extra couple points.
Adam Nash:I do think there were lessons from the SVB thing and moving money around. I think there's lessons for new entrants as well as incumbents For incumbents. I think they need to recognize that customers and money can move faster than they think, and so they need to focus a little bit more on their customers and the features and not rest on the laurels of basically friction and the fact that people historically have not moved accounts so readily, because now they will. And even if they don't move the account, moving the bulk of the money is effectively the same thing. You know this from SaaS. In churn, there's hard churn which is like I want to close my account. There's a softer churn where I downgraded to the free tier, I'm not using it anymore, or I have fewer seats, yeah, exactly. And so I think that the existing industry would be wise to not just assume that they're safe, that this is actually an indicator that money and people can move faster than they thought.
Adam Nash:And I think for new entrants, I'll tell you, as Daffy, it's a gift. So one of the things I got wrong with our launch we launched about two and a half years ago and when we launched there was no way for people to just move money from an existing donor advised fund to DAFI, because we didn't know how hard that was to do? It turns out it's very easy. You can go to any DAF and just make a grant. You have to move all of it. You have a Fidelity charitable account.
Auren Hoffman:Right, because it's one charity to another.
Adam Nash:You just give it to charity, yeah, you make a grant. And so we quickly, in the next sprint, got that feature out. It's actually turned out to be because a lot of people look at their existing donor advised funds. If you have a donor advised fund at Vanguard or Fidelity, you're paying 60 basis points. I mean if you have $100,000 account, you're paying $600 a year. That's money that could go to charity Daffy's less than half price. We're $20 a month, flat rate.
Auren Hoffman:I know why. Fidelity, they always charge all this stuff. But Vanguard, they really do treat consumers so well on pretty much everything, except for the donor advised fund. Why haven't they gotten shape?
Adam Nash:on that. Listen, I love Vanguard. It was actually one of the great things that happened when we launched. Felix Salmon, who's a famous columnist brilliant guy loves Vanguard. He was even shocked, so when we launched he ended up writing a piece about when is the startup 13 times cheaper than Vanguard? The best coverage, but the reality is part of it is because I think Vanguard is actually getting to the truth of the matter, which is that for Vanguard one, this is not where the next trillion dollars of assets come in. They've gone to such a scale they have to be thinking in trillions and tens of trillions.
Auren Hoffman:The total dollars in donor advised funds is a rounding error to.
Adam Nash:Vanguard, and so there's a certain scale and focus thing that happens with even the best organizations that are large. But the second reason is these organizations, particularly donor advised funds, have not invested in technology. I see donor advised funds that manage billions of dollars, but they have teams of hundreds of people doing email, PDFs, doing concierge service, and so a lot of that fintech, automation, a lot of that ability to do things in software instead of human. I don't think these donor advised funds like Vanguard are minting money. I don't think these donor advised funds like Vanguard are minting money. I think that they are trapped a little bit where they built a product for what they thought was their best customer, who had a lot of money. They are delivering value, and so they built out concierge service instead of building out software.
Adam Nash:And so when I look at Daffy, a lot of people ask me how can you afford to do what you're doing? $3 a month, our base account we're free under $100. And, like I said, our high end is $20 a month. When I look at it as a service, I mean I think there's a lot of consumer fintechs out there that would love to get $20 a month. I mean, think of the range of services like $20 a month in software is an you know so I'll do that all day long. And for us it's mission oriented, because for us the ability to offer the service lower cost means that not only we can open it up to those 60 million households across the US who give to charity every year, but it also means more money for charity. That lower fees means that that money is sitting there in accounts that can compounds, that can be given to actual operating charities who are doing good with it.
Auren Hoffman:I have a donor advised fund at Daffy but before that I had a donor advised fund. But so many people I talk to don't have a donor advised fund. It seems like such an easy way, I mean, for giving really anything to charity at all. It's a great way to manage it because there could be certain years you want to get more. It just helps you keep the flow going, etc. From a tax standpoint. Why do so few people use a donor advised fund to begin with?
Adam Nash:Well, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but it's something I tell founders as an investor and it's something that I believe strongly. The problem is the business model. You and I both know we've been around software long enough. We remember when it was packaged software, the amount that Adobe actually cared about how many people were using Photoshop versus buying Photoshop. Once you bought the box for $6.99, adobe got their money. Their biggest question was all right, can I upsell the next version? Once we moved online to usage, saas, pricing made sense. Now they're paying every month. We better be earning that value every month In donor advised funds. The business model is a percentage of assets. It's AUM and it has been for decades.
Auren Hoffman:But it still made sense prior to DAFI for people to have a donor advised fund, yet still so few people did it. Why is that? But?
Adam Nash:who would tell them? So financial advisors would tell people to get a donor advised fund. But who has a financial advisor? You have to have more than a million dollars liquid net worth, in most cases maybe more. An accountant might tell you if you had a good accountant. But most people just try to get their taxes done. And so the reality is, and the institutions wanted larger accounts, that's what they want. Fidelity doesn't want a large number of small accounts, they want six and seven figure. They want billion dollar accounts are now what's going around the industry, and so what you see is the industry was all aligned around the business model, which was really tailored to the ultra wealthy, and so I think most people just didn't hear about it. But you're right, I agree with you.
Adam Nash:The reason we built Daffy and I'm a big advocate, whether you use Daffy or any other provider if you give to charity on a regular basis, if you give to your church or synagogue, your kid's school, an alma mater, a cause, having a donor advised fund, having a separate account, tax advantaged for charity it's like having a tax advantaged account for retirement or for college savings.
Adam Nash:It just makes a lot of sense. And then, once you have one, you start discovering, oh, this is so useful. I have one place for all my donation receipts. I can set up recurring donations for the organizations I care about. I can see what I gave last year. And, by the way, if you actually own investments in stocks or ETFs or crypto, the benefits of donating assets from a tax perspective are phenomenal, and so I love it. At Daffy, I see this all the time. We've seen incredibly large and generous stock contributions millions of dollars, even tens of millions but I love seeing people I see that quarterly vesting of that engineer coming through and I see them send into Daffy a few thousand dollars of stock every quarter, and then you see the donations go out to the alma maters, the schools, to their religious organizations or the causes they support. It's a much better way to give, and to give intentionally.
Auren Hoffman:One of the things it seems like a lot of these fintech companies just do is just simply make a better UI. The product might not even be that much different in many cases. In some ways, like Robinhood, is it that much different than E-Trade? The UI is just 10 times better, but the product's basically the same, I think Robinhood has the advantage of actually trying.
Adam Nash:but yeah, keep going.
Auren Hoffman:Okay, yeah, well, that might be it, but the UI itself is such a big advantage. Even if you've used Mercury versus Silicon Valley Bank prior to Silicon Valley Bank, blowing up the Mercury UI was 10 times better. The product wasn't that different, but the UI was so much better. How much of just going to FinTech is just making sure, respecting the user, really thinking of them from first principles, giving them a great experience, rather than just having to come up with some huge product innovation.
Adam Nash:I think there's room for a lot of interesting product innovation. But I love this attention to design because when I got into fintech about 15 years ago, this was actually one of the big arguments going on. I actually talked with some of the largest institutions in the world financial institutions at the board level about this and you have to understand that for most incumbents they didn't think it mattered. They knew money was a trust business. The relation was all about trust, but to them it was about very objective things like not losing the money, good customer service, taking care of different issues. The idea that the technology or the UI mattered was like well, you have to be able to do what you do, but it's easy enough to figure out and you can get your stuff done. It wasn't a priority.
Auren Hoffman:Sorry, let me just push back on it a tiny bit. When you walk into a Chase bank, it's beautiful, it's spotless, they think of everything. And then when you go to the chasecom site, it's like imagine going to the bank and there's rats and cockroaches running around the bank. That's what it's like. Do you think of a UI when you actually go to?
Adam Nash:the branch. In fairness to Chase, actually, and I don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing, they're actually one of the better big banks when it comes to the UI.
Adam Nash:But I agree with you. Okay, well, that's pretty sad if they're one of the better ones. And that was exactly the argument I made when I started out, which is that all that energy you put into the customer experience around the branch. Why did they do that? Because what they wanted you to feel when you walked in is that this is a good place, this is a safe place. By the way, some of the nicety of it was like oh, they're clearly doing well, they must be trusted, friendly people.
Adam Nash:Yeah, what I believe is that we all talk about these generations, but let's be clear the biggest generational break that's existed in the last 50 years is that there are people who've grown up with computers and people who learned how to use them later. And for the people who grew up with computers and software and interfaces, my argument was that one of the ways you build trust with them is the quality of your technology. It's the quality interface. If I go to a website and it's kind of janky, it doesn't load very well, it's using an old form, it's the UI that looks like it's from 2003. I'm sitting there thinking, if they can't build a good website, how do I know they're going to handle my money well, what are their priorities? Maybe I shouldn't be using this product. They obviously don't care that much, Whereas when you go to a high quality, modern product, modern UI, you go, oh, this works, this is safe. I can see why millions of people use this product.
Adam Nash:So I agree with you on I think that this was something that the existing industry missed. And then, I think about five to seven years ago, the large incumbents at least some of them got the message and they said, oh, this actually does matter for this younger generation. When they come in and see bad technology, they worry about all of our service. How do they know that they can trust us with their data? How can they trust it with their money? How do I know that if I have a problem there'll be someone to talk to? They were so used to things like phone service and fax lines. The idea of wait I go to the website, I have a problem right now, Can I get an answer to my problem? Call back on Monday at 8am is not a great answer.
Auren Hoffman:So, as someone who has a design background, I actually love seeing the renewed emphasis in finance in general around UI, but not as much as it could be To me it doesn't make as much because the financial world, as we mentioned before, it's so competitive, no one has a lot of market share, there's no dominant monopoly and so easy to move, and so yet they're not really fighting for their customers. In certain cases, salesforce, their UI is atrocious and it's horrible and it's slow and they don't really care about the individual salesperson. In some ways you need 16 clicks to go do something, but they have a monopoly, so it doesn't matter. It makes sense. Even where you used to work LinkedIn I don't want to throw LinkedIn out of the bush, but it's terrible. It's so slow, but they have a monopoly so great it makes sense. Don't understand why they don't make the investment.
Adam Nash:Well, I think there's a couple of reasons, but I think you can look to tech for different examples, and I'm going to ignore the bait on LinkedIn, right now, just because there's stories to tell, but no think about, even in tech, the differences in strategies, the difference in strategy between an Apple or a Google or a Facebook, et cetera, and how they think about these things.
Adam Nash:There are companies that focus on market share the most users. There's companies that focus on usage because that's their business model. There's ones that actually focus on profits, making the most money. I mean, actually, I will tell you, as someone who was there in the late 90s when Apple almost died and Steve came back, that actually Apple explicitly stopped focusing on market share and more focused on profitability.
Adam Nash:In financial services.
Adam Nash:The banks are filled with incredibly smart people, as talented as anyone in that industry, who know the numbers, the dollars and cents, and they focus on profitability.
Adam Nash:So even that framing around market share, you get more of this leverage of what exactly business are they trying to build and their timeframes are not necessarily very long.
Adam Nash:These are public companies. They're looking quarter to quarter and so, frankly, I think when a lot of these design decisions come up, they end up with this decision of oh, we could spend a lot of money rebuilding this product and, by the way, that product on the back end has to interface with 40 patched together systems because the bank acquired 30 other banks, all these other compliance things from historical things, operational flows etc. And so the cost of that I will tell you. You know, I was always very proud and once again I don't mean to bring Wealthfront so much into this, but I remember talking to a large institution when I was early at Wealthfront and we had raised enough seed series, a money where we had spent millions of dollars building out Wealthfront. We found out that one of the incumbents had figured out that to build something equivalent to what we had launched as our 1-0, the MVP, not even where we were at, they had internally scoped that project as costing over $100 million and would take three years to do.
Adam Nash:Yeah of course, yeah, and so I think sometimes, when we look at these decisions, we take for granted in tech our assessment of what's easy, what's hard, what's expensive, what's not expensive and what impact it will have on the business. It can be a very different frame than an incumbent who is saying, well, we could do this project, but we've done the analysis and it'll only bring in this much in incremental revenue or profit versus this other thing that we could do. But I do think it's short-sighted. I do think we're in a world that's increasingly virtual, it's increasingly online, and I think the companies that are not building core competency around design, ui, quality products are going to regret it at different points when they have to face a fierce competitor who has that expertise going to regret it at different points when they have to face a fierce competitor who has that expertise, even Stripe.
Auren Hoffman:Their clients are developers. But if you go to their API docs, they're beautiful, they're so well done, they even think of that. We're going to make for the developer a great experience.
Adam Nash:It's very interesting. But, like I said, I see this in tech too. You see technology companies where what they push through in design and what they push through is really to the limit of what they can justify. And then you have founders and you have companies that are like no, there's a quality bar, it's subjective. I love talking about this, by the way, because, having worn both hats, the engineering world loves decoupling, it loves decentralization, it loves not having dependencies so people can just build, because the best software very often gets built by one or two people.
Adam Nash:Design requires taste. There's curation, there's editorial. It's not about it all being good ideas. It has to make sense cohesively together. And so design tends to want a tastemaker, some unifying factor through everything. And this is one of the things that, to me, makes software so exciting is because you have to bridge those two worlds in product. The engineering world that wants it distributed, separated, and then the design standpoint says, yeah, it has to make all sense together. It actually has to solve the customer problem, be intuitive and, ideally, be delightful for them, be something that they irrationally love to use, not just rationally. So it's a hard bar to clear, but that's what we fight to do.
Auren Hoffman:I mean you're a longtime product management person. There's sometimes a tension in product between what the data says and what the anecdote says. How do you navigate that?
Adam Nash:tension. Oh, I love this question and this is part of the product talk I normally give. I think at the top of my X account you'll see it pinned up there. I have a talk about being a product leader that I gave a few years ago. But it's very tricky to navigate that tension and that's because they're all different ways of understanding your customer.
Adam Nash:I mean any company. You have all these different funnels. You know everyone wants to say that they're the voice of the customer. It tends to not be one voice. Every click, every data element that's left, that was a human that did that. Why did they do that? When did they do that? Customer service messages who's having problems?
Adam Nash:Market research is telling you about your non customers. You have user research. You have salespeople on the field. You have all these different inputs and so what I tend to look at is I look for hypotheses and then I look for some form of validation. So I'm a big believer that any input can be an insight for a new hypothesis. It could be from the data I've seen growth.
Adam Nash:Product managers, engineers, analysts say like hey, it looks like we're getting a lot of drop-off here. That seems like a problem. Data can be the insight. Customer service can be the insight, but it can be user research, it could be market research, it can be qualitative. You could just have a conversation with someone and it strikes you wow, that is really broken. I get it now. I didn't know that was a use case.
Adam Nash:And so what I always look like is for one team or one function to come up with a hypothesis, and then I look at all the others to say is there any validation of that somewhere else? If I get a qualitative hypothesis like an anecdote interesting, do we have any data to support that? If I see a data insight, I then go to the qualitative and ask what would explain this pattern of behavior? Because the data rarely gives you causality, it doesn't give you intention, but data can tell you something is happening reliably. And so to me I actually feel spoiled, because I remember in the early days how little data we had and little customer insight we had in the 80s and 90s. And so to me it's like, wow, we have all these resources. So for me it's all hypothesis testing. You can get an insight from anywhere it can come from any team.
Auren Hoffman:If it's qualitative, get a quantitative validation, and vice versa. What are the big?
Adam Nash:non-obvious mistakes that big product managers make. There's so many mistakes product managers make. I mean, you're putting me on the spot to rank them all. I think it depends, because product managers tend to come from one of three backgrounds. They tend to either have a technical, engineering background very quantitative or design background, very qualitative, etc. Or a business background. What are we doing this all for? And the best product managers find ways to shore up their skills, and the other two In fact some of the best have done multiple roles that way For sure. So I think the mistakes that each type make are different, but if I had to level it up and not everyone will agree with me, so just to be clear, I've always believed that software at its best is actually a team sport.
Adam Nash:I grew up in California. I played volleyball in high school. I believe in team sports. I think that everyone has different skills. You organize plays and what you can do together ends up being a multiplier over what you could do alone. And so I think that the biggest mistake that product managers make is they think they're managers instead of what they really need to be, which is leaders. You have a team with different skills and different backgrounds and different insights, but they're all brilliant. They all want to win and do the right thing for the customer, and so that idea of really thinking of yourself more as a leader, not as someone who can know we have a process and check this box and do this, and there's a lot of product managers out there who think the job is somehow a process job. If I do these 80 things in order, I will be doing a good job. That's not actually the job. Product is one of the few roles I believe firmly where you actually get judged based on the results and, by the way, even the best product folks don't bat a thousand. We can talk about batting average versus slugging percentage for the handful of people out there who still love baseball statistics. I still love baseball statistics, but there's only four of us left. I know Actually it's funny, but it's a great analogy.
Adam Nash:When I was at Dropbox, I gave this talk about how to think about risk and how to manage a team, et cetera, but it was really around very basic things of one making sure that your whole team is aligned. They know the strategy, they know the priority, they know the goals. There's a reason why you're doing this project. Does everyone understand it, because if they don't understand it, they're not gonna be putting their best effort and applying their knowledge and skills to helping you solve that problem. You're not solving the problem. Your team is gonna solve the problem. But then, second, I think the big mistake they make is it's not a job. That's meant to be, an E for effort, it's not just going through the motions.
Adam Nash:If you are a product manager, if you're the product leader for the area, in the end you have to make sure that what you're building fits into the overall strategy. You know what the goals are, how it's going to be measured, because you are going to be the one, the day after you launch, where people come to you and say, hey, did it work? And so I've been amazed at how many product managers don't ask themselves that simple question. The day after this launches, your CEO comes to you and say, hey, how's it going? I know we launched yesterday. What do they want to hear?
Adam Nash:And the answer is there was a reason why that project exists in the fund place. Was it to get more users? Was it a growth feature? Was it an engagement feature? More activity, was it a revenue driving feature? I was shocked when I got into product because I came over from the engineering side. I was shocked when I got into product at how many projects did not have a clearly articulated goal. If I had to give any advice to product managers out there, it would be the leadership piece, and part of leadership is making sure your team knows what the goal is how they'll be judged.
Auren Hoffman:Let's say you have a 100-person tech company. You may have eight product managers total at that company and you may have a lot of engineers. You have salespeople, you have customer success, you have marketing people. You have all these other people. In some ways, the product manager is also a bit of the router. They have to interact with all of those people. Even if you're the VP of product, you may only have a few people under you and you have to be constantly interacting and you're at the center of the company. Most of these other things are a little bit more on the edges sales, marketing, engineering or something. A lot of engineers don't talk to people in marketing, but the product people have to talk to everybody. Is there a certain type of personality that thrives at being that router? Well, so.
Adam Nash:I think you're getting at the heart of it, that there's a people element to it, and so I do think communication is important and connectivity, because product managers in the end, because they're judged by the overall success of the product, of what you ship it becomes a little bit of yeah, how do you get all those people, all that information flowing across the best solution out there to achieve that goal? And I do think that they are glue, but it's never meant to be people. It has to be a leveraged role. I'm on the record of saying I've actually seen teams with engineers and designers where I thought the product manager involved was a net negative. Just getting a couple engineers together and designer, they can do amazing work together. But usually the product manager think about how expensive the product manager role is. You have to say this product will turn out better Instead of hiring another designer, instead of hiring another engineer, we decide to hire this product manager. That's a high bar to clear. You can do a lot with another engineer, especially at a startup. Your hundred people, you know these decisions. That's an expensive decision and so I think that the best product managers think of themselves. They are leveraged.
Adam Nash:You believe the team is doing so much more, and so sometimes that's a communication plot. The reason you see so many writing oriented cultures now which I love is the more people right it used to be only the product managers wrote a lot. Now you get engineers writing, designers writing. Figma is shared. It's fantastic. So sometimes it's communication, sometimes it's knowledge, Sometimes it's just the framework of putting things together, sometimes it's making sure that the right data is in front of the right people.
Adam Nash:I actually am not a big fan of large product teams. I do think that the closer the engineers are to the customer, the easier it is for them to understand the customer viewpoint directly. The further engineers are from the customer, the easier it is for them to understand the customer viewpoint directly. The further engineers are from the customer, the more you need people who are saying no, actually we've talked to the customer, we've studied the customer, we've looked at the data. This is actually what's highest value. But yeah, this is what I meant by being a leadership in the team role. The product manager does not do everything and, by the way, despite the CEO analogy that some people like to use, no one reports to you. I mean, I remember as an engineer when I first like a product manager. I'm like, wait, do I have to do what they say?
Auren Hoffman:I don't report to you.
Adam Nash:And, by the way, there's a little bit of that moment where product managers suddenly realize, like wait, how do I get anyone to do anything Right? And the answer is it's a leadership question. You know, what the team wants to do is they want to win, they want to succeed. They joined that company for a reason, they're working on that product for a reason and if you do a good job communicating what you're trying to do and why and how, it's good for the customer and good for your business and good for the team. And it's exciting. I've seen product managers get teams to do more in a week or two than they would normally get done in a quarter spinning off and re-architecting things and rewriting things, et cetera. But it is a high bar to clear. I wish I could tell you that almost all product managers clear it, but they don't. There's quite a few who think it's a process job.
Auren Hoffman:Now I love the finance advice for the world of DAS listener. And the average world of DAS listener is actually super wealthy. Most of them are CEOs or executives at companies. They're doing pretty well. They've got a big career ahead of them as well. So they're maybe not the average consumer out there. Definitely they should get a DAF 100%. So that's for sure. They've probably already done the basic stuff. What else should they be looking at doing that? Maybe they haven't thought through yet.
Adam Nash:Oh, that's interesting. I want to be careful and judicious about advice because everyone's situation is different at different places age and that sort of thing. I'm glad you mentioned the donor advised fund. I actually to your point. Actually, I've been surprised at how many very educated, intelligent people don't know that donor advised funds exist.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, at the end of this podcast, all of them are going to set up a donor advised fund. If they haven't done it, they're going to do it for sure. That's table stakes.
Adam Nash:Yeah, table stakes, but I think in general I actually back up to the basics, which is I actually come from the point of view around money, that money is rarely the goal. It's a means to an end. I think that not enough people actually take the time to think about what life they want to have, what their priorities are. I've been married more than 20 years Congratulations. But one of the reasons my wife and I have done well together is we talked early about the life we wanted to have and we decided we wanted to build it together and there's an alignment. And, by the way, even when it comes to money, every year in the summer it's actually coming up in August. We go through all of our finances and look at it together and we talk about what happened in the previous year and what stresses and strains might happen in the next year. Why August?
Auren Hoffman:Because that's when you're about to do your taxes, or something, or why is that?
Adam Nash:No, it's just a slow time, it's just an easier time to do it.
Auren Hoffman:It turns out there's a lot that happens.
Adam Nash:Yeah, so it's like a marital board meeting you have I don't know if it's a board meeting, but I think allocating time if you are married, if you have a partner, et cetera. You'd be shocked at how many people do not have an open relationship, transparent relationship around money. They'll talk about all sorts of other things that are serious, et cetera.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, that's a great idea. My wife and I should do it.
Adam Nash:And it's not a hard thing to do and I think it builds trust and actually gets you to the real questions. I think that the next thing I would probably recommend on goals there is prioritization. I mean, I'm a product guy so I'm going to tell you everyone wants everything. I get it. But in the end of the day, there are some theories around risk and finance that are not based on volatility. They're based on the human thing.
Adam Nash:Where will your regrets be? For some people and I'm not saying everyone, but for some people they're like if I can't help my kids go to college, I feel like I failed. Just be honest about that. That's not number go up. No, there's a specific goal where you're going to be risk averse until you feel like that goal is achieved and then you're going to be risk seeking, and we all know that one of the problems people have going after opportunities is actually being risk seeking enough to actually put themselves in the position to have outsized success. So I am a big believer in actually having that real talk about what the goals are and the highest priorities. But I mean, the last thing is is just to remember. It's a little bit of humility and I know this is really hard because the listeners of this podcast yourself, etc. All very high IQ, all very successful. There's some ranking somewhere, there's some dimension where they're not just 1%. They might be within the 0.1% 0.01% in the world.
Auren Hoffman:Certainly on IQ. I think our average audience is at the 50th percentile, so we're not that great on the IQ front, but maybe on the other things we're doing well.
Adam Nash:Well, listen, I'll just say that actually it can be very hard when you are so good at something and I know this because a lot of my family are previous generation doctors, lawyers, that sort of thing. These are brilliant people might know the law better than anyone might have argued a case in front of the Supreme Court A doctor might be one of the best in their field. But just recognizing that when it comes to money, when it comes to investing, the odds are really stacked against you, somehow beating the market, somehow outperforming that way Most of us are going to find our success building products, building services, building businesses where we are experts, and so understanding that a lot of the things I mean Isaac Newton famously got caught up in a financial bubble and speculation. Having the humility to say that I don't understand this enough.
Adam Nash:The greatest thing that Warren Buffett has ever done around investments at times is to say that may be a great business, it's not one that I understand, or I understand how that's gonna work, et cetera and, by the way, this is why he was very late into technology. Having some humility about what you know and what you don't know, understanding where you're gonna find success and then not falling into that trap, that kind of competitive greed trap that it feels like oh all these other people seem to be making lots of money for free. Oh, all these other people seem to be making lots of money for free. I should go make money for free and realizing that that's more of a distraction than anything else in value creation. Gambling is in some ways kind of an entertainment thing.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, it's fun if you have a side little pool to gamble with, as long as it's a small piece of your income.
Adam Nash:Some people think it's fun. I have no fun when I go to Vegas and that sort of thing I like, do one bet and that sort of thing. But this idea of to be risk seeking where you have an advantage, to, where you actually have information, where you have capabilities, other people don't Financial markets are rarely that place. I mean, I cannot tell you how many brilliant people around the world wake up every morning and their livelihood depends on them figuring out some way to generate a little bit more money than everyone else, and so the idea that in your spare time you're going to go off and somehow run the table it just gets a lot of very smart, successful people into a lot of trouble, and so usually those are the things I talk about with folks.
Auren Hoffman:What do you think of other types of products, like a self-directed IRA, which feels like very similar to DAF in many ways? There's a lot of similarities to those types of things.
Adam Nash:I'm an investor in one company, alto IRA, that offers self-directed IRAs. Yeah, good company, I have some bias. I think the short answer is I like the idea of a self-directed IRA, I like giving people the flexibility to invest how they want to invest, and I do think that there are assets that go beyond just the standard stocks and bonds that can add value to a diversified portfolio. For sure and you don't need to believe me, endowments know this, etc. And, of course, retirement accounts are invested ideally for a very long time, and so that can make sense. That being said, sometimes I think people are over optimizing a small problem instead of focusing on the big one. I am an engineer at heart. If you have a performance issue, you go where the biggest performance issue is, you know, on the small one, and so, for me, chasing this dream of building up a giant IRA is not really the point. Some people get really irrationally energized by saving money on taxes and look, you should be smart about taxes. They set up the rules for a reason.
Auren Hoffman:You live in California, right?
Adam Nash:So especially if you live in California, California likes to make it very clear that taxes matter and it's a big number to focus on 54%. But fundamentally, once again it comes back to that basic advice of is that really where your time is best spent If you want to build a portfolio for the long term that involves assets that you can't get in a traditional IRA. Yeah, a self-directed IRA can make sense for those assets, for sure, or for a portfolio, but in general I get worried sometimes because I see this lottery effect. I mean, everyone knows the Peter Thiel story. Everyone knows that somehow Facebook stock very, very early got into a Roth IRA that ended up being worth a lot.
Auren Hoffman:Mitt Romney has a similar story.
Adam Nash:By the way, it can make sense. But you also have to remember that those people were in very particular positions. They were already fairly successful, et cetera, and could take some of that risk, and they did not have all their eggs in one basket by any stretch of the imagination and it turned out. They actually had pretty big baskets, as it turned out, and they got bigger. So I like it.
Adam Nash:But I see all financial products as tools. I like to do stuff around the house. I like tools. Like I said, it's just a tool is good if it's designed to do what you need it to do, if it solves that problem. So I think self-directed IRAs, donor advised funds, 529 plans these are all tools that, if it matches with what your goals are and what you're trying to do, fantastic. You should use them for sure. But for retirement accounts, a lot of people just do very well with the sleepy Vanguard account. I mean, wealthfront's a fantastic option. You set it and forget it and just make sure you're putting money into that thing, so that that's one less thing you have to worry about down the road.
Auren Hoffman:Now a couple of personal questions. Daffy, I think, is the first company you founded and I don't want to reveal your age. I don't even know your age, but you would be not the typical 20-year-old founder that people envision quote, unquote college dropout type person. You already were CEO of a company beforehand. You had many leadership positions. You worked your way up at Apple, as you mentioned. What are your thoughts when you're giving advice to young people like I got to found a company right away? How do you talk to them? How do you advise them on their own careers?
Adam Nash:That's a tricky question because myself I can't complain, but at the same time, I wouldn't consider myself the pattern for anyone. There's a lot of different paths. I've always been a little bit of a traditionalist. I think that doing a startup right out of the gate is risky, in a way that people don't quite understand when they're just coming out of school, if they're 20, etc. And that is. Everyone likes to talk in Silicon Valley about learning from failure, but it's actually harder than you think. When you try to build a company or a product and it fails, it turns out there's a thousand things you did wrong. Which one was the reason it failed? Causality Everyone has an opinion. You have a team of five people. You'll have at least 15 opinions about what you did wrong For sure and, by the way, there were probably, like I said, a lot. And so when you go to successful startups and successful companies, you get one advantage that I think is phenomenal, which is you actually see success amidst all the things they're doing wrong.
Auren Hoffman:Yes, oh, good point.
Adam Nash:I cannot tell you how many things LinkedIn did wrong while I was there. That's a good point. It is such a long list, but you know what I learned? Those things aren't material to building a long-term, very successful large business, because it's phasing, it's ordering, it's prioritization. There are some problems that you get to solve later, when you're successful, and there are some problems that actually can kill you early.
Auren Hoffman:I love this. The tweet on this is everybody does so many things wrong and most of those aren't going to kill you and they're not material.
Adam Nash:You just have to know what to do right, and so this is actually, by the way, the thing I see and the difference between people who have been at large companies where they didn't build the system they're working within the system versus having to build the system from zero to one or even just scaling, split scaling, et cetera. So my advice tends to be is actually the companies I like to route young people to, as I say, do a tour of duty or two at a fast-growing ideally, in my mind, mid stage startup. We used to put up this list at Wellfront, but even before that, a decade before, I would tell people, look for companies that have figured out their revenue model. They probably have millions of dollars in revenue. They're growing 100% year over year and they're still under 100 people. And the reason that's a fantastic place for young people to go is, first of all, they're still under 100 people.
Adam Nash:And the reason that's a fantastic place for young people to go is, first of all, they're growing rapidly, which means growth begets opportunity for young people. If you're going slowly, they'll hire someone who has experience to do the job. If you're growing fast, you don't have time for that. You can just raise your hand and go do the job. You may not be qualified for that job. You wouldn't get hired for that job, but the company needs you to do it. If it's growing 100% year over year the probability of you generating real equity value, you're going to see a 10X over three to four years. That's amazing and you'll learn a lot in the process.
Adam Nash:And then the network of people at those companies always turns out to be phenomenal. Even if the company doesn't work for some reason, those people go off, and so I tend to like to see young people do a couple tours of duty, not too much. Then if you want to go start a company etc. You'll have a network. You'll have some people. Doesn't have to take 100 years. A tour of duty to me is two to three years, taking a few years to learn. You'll see a lot of the great founders, even no one's. Look at Kevin and Mike at Instagram, etc. They did a few things ahead of time. I have no problem with people starting companies out of the gate. I mean for me personally, I'm a laggard. What happened for me is I just get excited about new products and new companies and technologies. I kept getting excited about things that I wasn't the founder of.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, which is great. You don't need to be a founder to have a huge impact.
Adam Nash:But once again, speaking to the Daffy founding story, the two big reasons I founded Daffy was one I really did want to start something. In fact, I left Dropbox. I actually wrote a post about it where I said no, I'm going to regret not doing a company myself. The bar was pretty high and I felt like Daffy was something that spoke to me. It was authentic product, founder fits, and also I had a little bit of hubris, but I wasn't sure anyone else was going to build this and this is a way for me to have impact in a world, and I do believe that building products and building companies is a way to have impact on the world Absolutely, and so that's my story.
Auren Hoffman:That's great. Last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
Adam Nash:It's a tricky question. We can all think of examples where conventional wisdom is off, but conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason Correct In most cases, it is the way to follow. I would say that the conventional wisdom I've run into and maybe that's just the LinkedIn background or that sort of thing but the most common conventional wisdom I've actually heard, especially for young people, is this idea of they should go off and graduate and do their time at a large incumbent company, a Google or Microsoft or something. Well now you'd say Google Back in the day it might have been IBM, etc. And these are great companies, by the way, there's nothing wrong with going to them. But this idea that those companies are somehow an unlock code for a successful life it just depends what life you're trying to build and how you define success.
Adam Nash:I think that our system in general overprograms people to believe that there's some sort of career ladder. I do this in high school and I do this in college, and then I do maybe grad school and then I go to a name brand company, etc. It's just been a very long time where that's what careers have looked like. Technology changes too fast, companies change too fast, innovation moves too fast, and so I think you have to have a growth mindset and I think the real danger is, when you go to these large companies, there's a lie built into them and, unfortunately, a lot of people learn this in the last couple years. People think, oh, it's a safe job. No, it's not. Yeah, it's definitely not safe. They'll do layoffs in a second, they'll reprioritize in a second. I can't tell you how many people went to large tech companies the last few years and then all of a sudden realized what I learned back when I was in college, when HP the company that was the original Silicon Valley company and was never going to do layoffs the HP way was never going to happen in 92 did layoffs and everyone realized, wow, if you, a Packard, can do layoffs, anyone can do it. Anyone can do it. And so I think they make a mistake thinking that there's safety there.
Adam Nash:I think they make a mistake thinking that there's money there, and I think it's actually, unfortunately, one of the places where parents well meaning they just want what's best for their kids for the most part. I mean I can't tell you how hard it was at LinkedIn. I actually did phone calls with parents. I actually got over it for recruiting. I literally would offer to people considering us interns, et cetera. I'd say, hey, by the way, if your parents want to talk, if they don't know anything about LinkedIn or what we're trying to do, I'm happy to talk to them. Some people took me up on the offer and I will tell you it really helped because most people, once they learn what new companies are building and who's involved, et cetera, they get excited for their kids et cetera.
Adam Nash:I do think it's persistent conventional wisdom, this idea of like step one is you're going to go to a big giant organization do your time, it's safe and secure, and then you'll somehow live your life later. I don't think that's the right advice. This is why I like routing people safe and secure and then you'll somehow live your life later. I don't think that's the right advice. This is why I like routing people. Like I said, that small, mid-stage, fast-growing startup 50 to 100 people, 100% year over year.
Auren Hoffman:This is great. Thank you, adam Nash, for joining us on World of Dash. This is super fun, but I follow you at Adam Nash on XI. Definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. I've been a longtime admirer of yours, longtime follower, so I'm really excited you joined us on World of DaaS.
Adam Nash:Listen, Arun. Obviously I've known you for a while and a big fan of yours as well, so I appreciate you having me on the show.
Auren Hoffman:If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdaaScom that's D-A-A-S. Worldofdaadascom and sign YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter, at at Oren that's A-U-R-E-N. Oren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of Das. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.