Transcript 0:00 When you understand that financial services are a commodity, it throws the entire concept of having headcounts of fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, it throws it out the window. 0:10 The farther away the executives are from the customer, the worse the product is. The farther away the engineers are from being able to ship, the worse the product is. 0:30 Welcome to FinTech Brainfood Interviews with Brandon, the CEO of Meow. Hey, Simon. Hey. 0:39 This company arguably created an entire category of fintech by focusing on offering high yield and higher deposit insurance at a time when banks were really not doing that and when interest rates began to rise after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. 0:57 They capitalized on what I believe is a generational market opportunity in B2B fintech. 1:04 Today, Meow is known for its access to high-yield Treasury, and while there are now a few in this category, none quite have had the explosive growth that Meow has. 1:15 This is a company that's laser-focused on execution, channel partnerships, and go-to-market. There's a ton we can learn here. I describe conversations I've had with Brandon like talking to a scalpel. 1:26 He'll get to the point so quickly and surgically, it's often hard for me to even keep up. Meow started as a very different company. 1:36 They offered high-yield access to stablecoins but may have pulled off the mother of all pivots. 1:42 Today, they offer up to, quote, "a hundred and twenty-five million in FDIC insurance through a sweeps network," and they're expanding internationally. And of course, the CEO has even graced the pages of Forbes. 1:56 So what makes Brandon tick? What makes Meow work? And are they building an enduring business? How will it all fit together? Brandon, thanks for coming to the show. Thank you for helping me get into this topic. 2:13 How did we get to where we are today? Give people a little bit more on you and how Meow really starts. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Simon. So first off, Meow Technologies is a financial technology company. 2:24 We're not a bank. We're not an FDIC depository insured institution, and the FDIC's deposit insurance, which you mentioned, only covers against the failure of an FDIC-insured bank. So that's an important part. 2:35 We're a fintech. 2:35 And how we got here was my co-founder, Bryce, and I, we always wanted to start a company together, and we're people who worked at companies our whole lives before wanting to start one, which I think actually put- positions us a little bit asymmetrically to what you see in the market often. 2:50 I mean, we've been cogs in the machine. We've seen what works at a tech company, what doesn't. We've been inside of it, right? We've, we've dealt with the inefficiencies. 2:57 So COVID came around, and that allowed people like us without a name to kind of access funding. If you had a company during COVID, a lot of people cashed out. 3:06 But if you were a no-name person, that would kinda let you break in, and that was kind of our opportunity to break in. And, uh, one thing led to another, and we, we wanted to build a B2B suite ultimately. 3:15 How we got there, we knew we needed a wedge, whether it would yield from ultimately T-bills or yield from alternative assets when we were starting. 3:23 It was always step one to building the B2B suite, and so that's kind of where we are now. Yeah. Well, I mean, classic disruption theory is you start with the wedge product, and you expand from there, right? 3:32 So, uh, take me to Meow today via that pivot. As you said, you started off with high yield on stablecoins but turned into high yield on Treasury bills. What is it like being inside of that pivot? 3:46 What, what did it look like for you and the company? 3:48 So we had just finished our Series A fundraise maybe, like, two or three weeks ago, and we started hearing rumors about institutions in kind of the crypto space that you shouldn't be hearing rumors about. 3:58 Just rumors, just to be clear. And we were thinking to ourselves, "We do not want it. We don't even like these rumors." So we got out of every single offering that our accredited inve- investors were facing. 4:08 We called them all up. We said, "Look, we don't like this at all. Like, why risk anything here? Let's just give you your money back." 4:14 So we actually called everyone and wired everyone their money back, uh, in almost all cases. Yeah. That was an easy decision for us. 4:19 I mean, on a just personal level, uh, we knew we're building a hundred-year company, and we didn't wanna deal with anything speculative, basically. Then we told our investors. 4:27 That was the only part that I was nervous about, was telling the investors about the decision we made. And thankfully, [chuckles] as you can imagine- It's like telling Dad. It's like, "Dad, I've, I've done a pivot." 4:37 Yeah. But they were the most supportive of all, which was really, really nice to see. 4:42 I mean, you have a feeling that you're dealing with, like, ethical people when you go into, like, the fundraise and you get to know them. You can vet your investors. 4:48 But coming out of it, it was like, "Oh, man, we, we really picked the right people here." 4:53 That was an easy decision for us on a personal level, and then we saw the risk-free rate, quote-unquote, "rising" in, in T-bills and things like that, and we said, "Why don't we make an easy interface, uh, for, for customers to access T-bills through, through other broker-dealers?" 5:07 And we made that interface, and a lot of the same customers came back in, and that kind of was the nucleus for, for Meow today. And Meow today is, is a pretty lean organization, as I understand it. 5:17 Like, you've really relied on, on partnerships quite heavily. Give me a sense of scale and scope. Like, how big is this technology company fundamentally? How many humans? 5:27 You know, what, what does that look like from the inside? So we're about fourteen people. We're very, very lean, and that's not because we couldn't hire more. 5:34 It's been actually the ethos of the company is to not hire, not solving pain by hiring. 5:39 That's the biggest mistake every founder makes, I think, is, like, when they have pain or even when they don't have pain, they hire, and that means you'll never actually address the root cause of the pain. 5:48 So we have over a billion in assets on the platform for Meow Technologies Inc. with those fourteen people, which I'm very proud of, uh, 'cause this is the only way, in my opinion, to build in financial services. 5:56 You have to be ruthlessly efficient. 5:59 I think historically financial services has been a game of misdirection, Simon I think it's been a game of advertising a high rate here while hoping customers don't notice that the checking account that your banking partner offers, uh, is not paying you interest. 6:13 So I think Fintechs are guilty of that too. You'll go to their websites, you'll see a really high rate, but it won't be for where your funds sit operationally in, in some cases. 6:22 So we don't like that and, and we wanna do everything the hard way up front 'cause we think it'll pay dividends in ten years, 15 years, 20 years. Which again, classic Silicon Valley ethos, but again, 6:32 2021, it was easier to hire, everybody needed another person, grow, grow, grow. Surely people can help out, and I think that's kind of a thing. 6:41 Where did that come from for you, that, that sort of, um, ruthless efficiency sort of mantra? I have to attribute it to working at companies, and we saw how inefficient the organizations were. 6:51 There were just useless people, pardon my language, that, that just slowed development down. The farther away the executives are from the customer, the worse the product is. 7:00 The farther away the engineers are from being able to ship, the worse the product is. 7:03 So it's like, well, why don't you just not hire them in the first place and just be low to the ground, automate everything that you can, and just... I'm still doing customer support, rightfully so. 7:12 The day I'm not is, like, a bad day for Meow, in my opinion. So we've just seen it happen firsthand. Yeah. There's nothing like that scar tissue of being inside a big company to make you wanna do things differently. 7:23 Believe that. So take me through the business today. How do you acquire customers? How do you make money? Just give me a basics overview of like what, what does that look like to be your organization? 7:35 So you mentioned channel partnerships. We-- That's actually a very new phenomenon for us. 7:38 I mean, there might've been, like, a Twitter post or something or two back, like, a year or two ago about, like, uh, being in a perks hub, but we really didn't invest in that. 7:47 It's all been kinda knocking on doors to start to get a nucleus of customers. Really just knocking on doors. Emails, uh, reaching out through friends of friends, reaching out through VCs. 7:57 That was how we got our first end customers, and we've only started going to the channel game in the past, like, two, three months, and I think you need to actually have-- You can't go too soon there 'cause you need to have some credibility as a company before any serious channel partner will take you seriously. 8:11 So how we make money is, like any other Fintech that, that has a-- it's a business banking Fintech, for example, there's a rate that the banking partner offers the end customer. In our case, 8:21 today, subject to the rate sheet through First Bank, the Tennessee corporation, uh, pays five point oh two percent APY as of today. 8:27 There's a delta between what's being passed back from them and what we capture, so we actually capture slightly more than that. 8:32 It's a very simple model, but what I think, maybe it's not innovation, but what I think people have been doing wrong, frankly, was treating financial services as a high-margin product that you can scale headcount on. 8:44 We treated it like a low-margin product because we think it's a commodity this whole time. 8:48 So that's why the banking partners we chose, we're aligned with them that we're passing back the majority of the economics to the customer. So we make less [chuckles] is the short answer on every customer that comes in. 8:58 We wanna be a volume business, not a margin business, is, is the idea. It's a really interesting perspective because you are definitely in growth mode, but the focus of staying cost lean is what enables you to do that. 9:13 It's almost Jeff Bezos-esque. Like, it's just everything is about cost in, in that sense. So, uh, talk to me about, um, shipping velocity. Um, I guess you're still a relatively small team, 14. 9:25 You're nowhere near Dunbar's number. But how do you think about your dashboard? Like, what are you looking at day to day to get a feel? 9:33 Are you close enough to all of it that you kinda know what's, what's hitting production and you're still, uh, not looking at a dashboard necessarily? Yeah. I would say we're in the thick of things, as you can imagine. 9:44 Like, I'm in the-- We have a Wednesday release every night. Everyone's... Like, even the two salespeople we have, right, they're doing, like, product development work. They're doing, like, customer support. 9:52 So everyone's involved with everything, and I think that's kind of how you have to build a company until you have, like, some kind of escape velocity at least. 9:59 And then even then, it's not gonna change much, in my opinion. But I'm looking at customer feedback in terms of, like, every time a customer reaches out to us, it's because the product's defective, point blank. 10:09 That's-- And I, I can't claim I came up with that. That was... I think it was Bezos. I'd ha- I'd have to double-check. But it's a, it's a product defect. They should not have to reach out. 10:17 They should just be pleasantly surprised at every turn that everything's working as they expect. So number one is, like, as soon as that happens, we make a ticket, we knock it out. That's number one. 10:24 Uh, number two, it's then how do we invent for the customer, like, like Bezos as well? 10:29 So the balls that we have to put in motion in Fintech for, like, a new product, it's not like a sa- software company that I could just spin it up overnight with a hackathon. 10:37 It's like I have to find the right partner or acquire the right licensing in some cases if I'm going for ano- another jurisdiction. 10:42 And that means if I wanna even approach that market or that opportunity in six months, I have to do that today. 10:47 So the things I'm doing today on top of customer support are things that you'll see in six months, basically. Well, I mean, licensing is non-trivial, probably for very good reasons. 10:57 But, uh, there's definitely a lot to do underneath that and, and a capacity, uh, constraint, uh, that that enables in terms of shipping new products and the velocity. 11:06 So who would you describe as your, like, sweet spot customer? So historically, our sweet spot customer is maybe like a two million dollar depositor. We went through, like, C through Series D, kind of Series A range. 11:17 They just kinda raised a round. We're getting in the ethos of, like, who we are as people and, like, the companies we like to serve. We wanna go smaller and smaller. 11:26 So we wanna go after, like, smaller and smaller businesses now. We like them. We, we understand them. 11:31 I think that's just, like, a beautiful, beautiful opportunity for us because it's, you know, the thirty million small businesses in America. That's the direction Meow is heading, yeah. Interesting. 11:38 They have similar problems. Uh, what does the-- what does that acquisition look like? They're not necessarily as tech-savvy necessarily across the spectrum. 11:46 There are customers, you know, a lot of them are very rate sensitive, which is kind of what we try to do. We try to pass back the best rates from our banking partners, right? 11:54 So it kind of like aligns nicely in that regard. So it's a matter of, like, having your digital footprint increase. We don't believe in paid ads right now. It's a matter of organic content. 12:02 It's a matter of, like, these channels that we're just starting to spin up. But yeah, there's gonna be a lot of throwing things at the wall. 12:07 Uh, but thankfully, our, our inbound engine has Kind of picked up since November. We've started to see that increase. Interesting. All right. 12:14 So, I mean, you're experimenting your way through to who's, like, the first adjacent possible, right? You, you had a sweet spot, like, ideal customer profile, I think, with that seed through a kind of stage. 12:27 But now it's any small business, but you're experimenting on the word any, like, to, to kinda get add resolution, which is, which is powerful. 12:36 And again, learning velocity comes from, from getting some reps on a lot of this stuff. So talk to me about Meow versus the world. Like, there's no lack of B2B fintech companies out there. 12:47 How do you see that landscape and how do you see your, uh, differentiation? It's a good question. What I could say at a high level is I do think we tend to make long-term decisions. 12:58 That's very important if you're a business banking fintech. So I don't believe in the kind of... 13:04 I don't know if it's necessarily ever, like, been codified as, like, the historical precedent, but I don't believe in the kind of spin up a banking partner in a second. You never meet the people at the bank. 13:13 You just kind of like go to market with it. You can market whatever. 13:17 I don't think that future exists, and I don't think that was the right decision for a lot of companies in the past, like, five years, three years, whatever. 13:24 So one thing we do differently in that regard is, like, I've, I've met the, the executives of our bank partners, at least two of them. Uh, I've flown out to meet them. 13:32 I was in Nashville just this month, and I was in Nashville two or three months ago for, for FirstBank. I've flown out to Houston to meet the folks at Third Coast Bank. 13:39 I've talked several times to the executives at, at, at Grasshopper as well. 13:43 So in doing so, I think that that positions us a little bit differently in terms of I think that's what you need to do, uh, to be around not just in the six-month short term, but also in, like, the five, six year, uh, long term. 13:55 Yeah, 'cause a lot of the regulatory activity is, is heat on the banks, but the banks are taking a risk by onboarding a fintech company, a technology company as a partner. 14:05 So you're working back the other way proactively to say, "Here's how we're protecting you because we realize you're taking a risk on us." Is, is that kind of the framing here? 14:15 In part, but also I don't believe that if I had to guess, I would say if I'm a bank, I, which we're not, I wouldn't want, like, 30 different partners, right? 14:22 I would want, like, strong relationships with one, two, or three. And it's a matter of making sure you guys are aligned every step of the way and just seeing different go-to-market opportunities together. 14:31 So I think that's actually quite a powerful thing that we have, uh, going for us. Okay, that's an interesting perspective, right? 14:38 'Cause, uh, you know, banking as a service, in air quotes, when it first came around was this like, oh, we're gonna do for all of the banking products what Stripe did for payment acceptance. 14:48 That it's we're just gonna invent a new category, we're gonna make the compliance super easy, and everybody will be a, be a bank in the same way everybody can accept payments, but it, it doesn't translate. 14:59 What you're proposing is a different model of, like, two, three, a handful maximum of m- much deeper partnerships per bank are much easier to get your arms around. I tend to believe that. 15:10 I'm curious your thought, but I also do think there's also a spectrum of which of the banking as a service providers are doing things better versus worse, and I think that's difficult to argue. 15:18 So I guess, what's your mental model? Like, what do, what do you think about that? So great question. Um, the challenge I think is, is the market is not static, right? 15:28 Like, I don't think there's a right answer to that question. 15:31 Alex Johnson just did a piece, um, on something that I've always described as headless banks and this evolution towards being like if you have a matrix of the perfect technology company that has perfect, uh, risk and control, then in the top right quadrant, you'd probably get somebody that was building a bank from scratch as a developer and engineer. 15:54 So you start to look at Lead Bank and Column Bank as being developer-led and potentially heading in that direction, and you would look at sort of the, the big mega banks as having stronger controls. 16:06 What's, what's that look like somewhere in the middle of, of those two extreme points? And I think the market hasn't got there yet, but everybody's kind of converging on that top right quadrant. 16:15 And so to his credit, that's Alex Johnson's mental model, but I think it's, I think it's kinda the right one. The financial institution needs to do both things. 16:23 It needs the technology capability and the risk capability, and those are hand in hand rather than, uh, somebody else does the technology or one person manages the risk. It, it has to be owned across the piece. 16:34 I wanna sort of segue slightly to the next section on the broader industry with, with this question. Like, what's the non-obvious insight about the industry you've picked up over the last couple of years? 16:47 I have a very firm answer for this. It's something m- my co-founder Bryce and I have been beating the drum on, uh, for a while. It's that financial services are a commodity, Simon. 16:56 Like, we're not out here selling, like, some crazy thing that you can't access and therefore you're not getting interest on the checking account from our banking partners, right? 17:04 I don't know many people who believe that still, and I think that they should believe that. 17:09 That's the key to Meow, is that we treat it like a commodity, in our opinion, by passing back the majority of economics, making it a low margin product on day one, and dealing with the absolute pain that comes with that on day one. 17:20 Like, we don't scale headcount under the guise of customers, for example, not realizing they could be earning interest on a checking account with another partner or somewhere else or not earning rewards on a card somewhere else or not meaningful. 17:31 So when you understand that financial services are a commodity, it throws the entire per-- like, concept of having headcounts of fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. It throws it out the window. 17:43 I mean, what are we talking about here? Like, you gotta be lean, you gotta automate, you gotta serve customers the right way, and you gotta learn to do that very effectively. 17:50 'Cause I, I think the days of raising money, burning it, raising money, burning it to sell what is fundamentally a commodity, in my opinion, I think that's over. I think it's an interesting North Star, right? 18:01 As an organization, we believe that financial services are a commodity, therefore, we are going to aggressively work to stay lean and automate to be the most effective at delivering that commodity. 18:13 Um, and, and sort of, uh, again, in the, in the Bezos model. In a past life, uh, I used to be a consultant, and we used to talk about people, uh, are distributing, uh, commodity products and calling it a service. 18:26 Like a, a service fundamentally is like a really good waiter. They should show up and just fill your wine, do things proactively for you. Like it's that proactivity that makes it a service, not the price. 18:37 And competing on price, you're competing, competing in a commodity market. So there's-- I think there's still room for service. 18:44 Uh, if you look at the fastest-growing segment in banking generally, it's actually wealth management and advisory. Like people want that human touch. They want that cuddle. 18:54 Emotional needs need to be met, but not for most CFOs. And so that's a, that's a different market segment with different needs. 19:02 All right, so I, I wanna take a step back briefly to the fintech industry in the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. Where were you during the, the SVB crisis, and what was, what was kinda happening in that space? 19:17 So I think we were only 12 people at the time. We had a high interest checking account from our banking partner, Third Coast Bank, at the time, and we saw more than half a billion in inflows in a matter of a few weeks. 19:29 The, there was a couple days of our team, like my co-founder, myself, uh, our, our CRO or head of growth at the time, on multiple phone calls simultaneously just to onboard people. There was no sales process. 19:40 It was just people desperately trying to onboard, and that was a scary time for them, uh, certainly. I mean, we'll-- I don't think we'll ever see something like that again. I mean, I hope we don't. 19:49 But that was like I equate it to like a digital version of the Titanic, of like people scrambling for, for, for lifeboats. 19:54 [chuckles] It was a pretty unique time, and I think it kind of impacted everybody in this B2B category. But do you think it created any material risks to fintech as a category? 20:07 Like i-is that gonna be allowed to continue? Are partner banks gonna be pushed to off-board everybody? Is, is the category in trouble or no? I think it dials up the scrutiny. 20:17 If it could happen to SVB, then it's, it's a question of like, are, are the customers that someone else attracting to a bank, for example, are they gonna be more fleeting or less fleeting? Is that customer a risk? 20:28 Is the, the fintech a risk? So I certainly think it's had downstream of implications for fintech, but ultimately I think it can make the remaining fintech stronger in doing so. Interesting. 20:38 Uh, and how do you think about like fintech as a talent, uh, acquisition story? 20:43 If you were gonna hire person number 15, like what would you-- what's your sales pitch to person number 15 f- on the industry more generally? I just went through this actually [chuckles] with- [chuckles]... 20:53 with a candidate. The sales pitch is honestly, "Look, we're, we're selling a low margin product. It's not about being a $2 billion company in a year. It's about becoming a $20 billion company in 10. 21:02 We have a crappy, tiny WeWork with six people. If someone burps too loud, uh, we're all gonna smell it. 21:09 Uh, so we have to be super cost-effective, super lean, and put the customer first, and how we'll win as a company is by doing that and winning on volume in the long run." 21:18 I don't think there's like this awesome compelling pitch right now of anything other than that in the space. Like we really wanna position ourselves asymmetrically here. 21:25 We really wanna be the one that's cost-effective, that tries to always pass back the best economics to the customer at Miao and, and, and the people at our company embody that certainly. 21:32 So it's, it's a very small segment of people who, who would fit culturally at, at Miao. Yeah, I think that's something I've observed as well, like, uh, culture fit works two ways, right? 21:41 Like it, it's gotta work for all parties. One party could f- really feel like they want it and the other one definitely not. Um, but, but what, what motivates you and the team? Is it sort of disruption? 21:53 Is it, uh, momentum? Like what would you say gets you excited? Yeah. So my co-founder Bryce is, is from the Midwest. I'm from like Northern Virginia. 22:01 Like w- we have a different kind of perspective I guess on financial services than, than maybe some, you know, existing, uh, players. We've always felt financial services are kind of icky. We don't like it. 22:13 We think there's hidden fees everywhere. We think it's sneakiness. We think there's like percentage, like fees that you're not aware of. 22:19 You think that you could be earning interest on checking accounts, but you don't know to ask. 22:23 What we wanna do is basically tap into the biggest possible market of businesses, the smaller and smaller ones that are underserved, and give them what we think they deserve in the highest possible rates from our banking partners. 22:32 That is a big motivator for us, is kind of I, I don't like the word democratizing access to 'cause I think that gets thrown around in Silicon Valley a lot. 22:39 We wanna make available to smaller businesses just simply better rewards from our banking partners that they are not getting 'cause they don't have this kind of collective bargaining power. 22:49 They just go there and they just get, you know, forgotten. That really drives us. Impact is, is the big reason. 22:55 I think that sort of, uh, approach to impact is gonna be exciting for me to watch in the next 12 months as you experiment towards that second adjacent possible customer. 23:07 But, uh, sort of zooming back, I mean, Charlie Munger, uh, Jamie Dimon, some of the big name investors out there who have stayed the course, uh, big name CEOs who look after trillion dollar balance sheets, multiple billions, seem to hate the area you started. 23:23 You know, you started in, uh, crypto. You started in high yield stablecoins. 23:28 Is there wisdom in their perspective, or how do you think about the world of crypto, the world of stablecoins, even though you kinda moved away from it 'cause it wasn't the right market opportunity? 23:38 Uh, what are, what are your thoughts on it as a perspective? Well, I think there's a few different things happening here. 23:44 A stablecoin like USDC, for example, just take yield out of the equation or speculation with it out of the equation. 23:49 Like that, that's actually being used today in practice for people paying contractors overseas, for example. That has product market fit, and that's, that's attractive to a lot of people. 23:58 It's helping a lot of people that where the currencies are getting devalued, say in like Latin America, for example, or in some places in Africa. 24:04 That's been a net positive and it's It's totally different than something like speculating and, like, uh, searching for yield. 24:09 And then you have assets like Bitcoin and ETH, which again, if you're not, like, speculating with them in terms of, like, trying to get additional yield on them or something, they have their own kind of promises at least of what they can be. 24:20 You know, Bitcoin would, would claim it's an, an inflation hedge, and ETH would probably argue the same. There's a lot of different potential use cases. 24:29 I would say the most practical one that we've seen to date is the use of a centralized, audited stablecoin in the form of, like, USDC to pay contractors overseas. Yeah, powerful. 24:39 It-- You've got another payments rail that is being adopted bottoms up for small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and so on that, that's kind of happening. 24:47 Uh, how, how do you think about the risk appetite of large, uh, institutions towards that space? As you observe it as a, as a market observer, is that shifting since the ETF or no? 25:00 We actually don't deal with this at all anymore, so we haven't explored it or I don't know the answer. 25:05 And even on the, on the stablecoin side, I think it's something that if a business doesn't have, like, overseas contractors, for example, I doubt they'd be dabbling in that either. 25:13 So you'll notice we don't have any of those offerings or anything kind of similar anymore. So if it was a priority, it would be a priority on our roadmap, basically. Interesting. Uh, th-this is that ruthless focus again. 25:24 It's like you've kinda not looked at it since, since back then. That's a [chuckles] kinda consistent theme. Um, speaking of priorities, like, do you think in multiple years? 25:32 I mean, you sort of talked about the ten-year, uh, but it strikes me you're, you're somebody who thinks about, uh, ten minutes from now and ten years from now. 25:39 But how are you categorizing, like, what would be in those two buckets right now if you were to put something into either of those? 25:46 Ten minutes is like there's a bunch of Slack notifications that I'm getting right now that are just about customer requests that I'd be looped in right now if, [chuckles] if, uh, if I wasn't talking. That's ten minutes. 25:55 Ten years is the financial services are a commodity mentality, getting good at winning on low margins, making very-- making relatively little on every customer that we, that we serve. 26:04 So that's how do we get more ruthless, uh, with our costs? How do we beat down our vendors even further, right? 'Cause that's ultimately gonna get passed back to the customer. So that's on the ten-year kind of horizon. 26:13 And who are the right partners for us, by the way? Who are, who are the right financial institution partners for us, uh, on a ten-year time horizon as opposed to a one year? I-- It could be the same in every case. 26:22 It could be different ones. So those are the kind of things I think about on ten years. Um, and, and yeah, ten minutes is mostly like support stuff. 26:27 And then there is the kind of like six-month thing, which is like putting a new product ball in motion, which requires a new partnership kind of thing. 26:34 I was gonna say, that time horizon's an interesting one to me because, um, I don't think you can urgent your way into sustainable, but that North Star of like, no, this has to be a sustainable business. 26:44 How do you manage that tension, especially in the wake of sort of seeing all of the, the news in the fintech press at the moment? Like, that's gotta concentrate your mind and make it a priority. 26:53 Like, how do you manage that tension in, in that six-month horizon? You're potentially applying for licenses. You're working with partners. What is it that allows you to keep that in focus? 27:05 There's compliance risk versus execution risk. Like, if you're not doing something right now, you're not executing. But if you execute too fast or in the wrong way, that creates compliance risk for the future. 27:16 How do you balance those two? Right. Yeah, there's no, there's no balance. 27:20 We, we always have to take the compliance-first approach because we wanna be a hundred-year company, and I think it's the dumbest thing in the world, frankly, to do anything. 27:26 There's not a single deal or a single tweet or a single LinkedIn post that would justify an existential risk to a company. Just if you don't take exis- I, I've said this multiple times. 27:35 If you, if you stay in the game, you tend to win the game. Every company that's publicly failed in the past five, six years, in my opinion, shot themselves in the foot by being greedy. 27:44 It's like, well, what if you don't invade Russia in the winter, right? It's a line from "Limitless." Like, what if you just stay the course, you stay in the game, you stay humble, you just do the right thing? 27:51 Good things happen to you. So it's, it's not a consideration for us at all. That's a powerful perspective. Like, yeah, it's, it's staying in the game longer. 27:59 That's a consistent lesson from, from entrepreneurs that have made it. Can you and should you look to go global, or is your focus still domestic? So I would say it's more domestic now. 28:09 We had a successful motion for, like, a certain subset of global, uh, customers, and if we wanted to double down on that, it required us to kind of, like I talked about, put a ball in motion to be ready in six months. 28:19 We've seen the demand kind of pick up again in domestic, and we've seen different segments that are working and channels that are working. 28:27 So I would say we're much more focused domestically right now, but financial services are obviously a global market at the same time, right? It's like a sixteen trillion dollar industry, so it's a when, not an if. 28:37 Uh, but again, it's a matter of ruthlessly prioritizing and, and organizing, and that, that can certainly change for us on, on like a multi-month period. I envy your ability to prioritize so efficiently. I genuinely do. 28:49 Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wish I had? I've talked a lot about how Meow believes financial services are a commodity, right? And how we wanna always pass back the best economics we can. 28:58 What's your mental model, I guess, in terms of if you think it's a commodity, do you think it's like a fully a commodity? Do you think there's room to kind of be a fully sales-led organization? 29:07 Do you think it's a good strategy to kind of keep raising at higher valuations and burn money and, like, sell what is ultimately, like, this product? Like, what's your take on that? 29:15 I guess the answer to the question is it depends what works for you, and it depends what works for the market. So, like, uh, what's the right answer to how to get healthy? Well, define healthy. 29:25 You know, what does that mean to you? It's a different question for different people who offer different services. So I don't think there's a right answer to that question. 29:33 Uh, I think the best answer is, depending on what your customer problem is, how can you solve it? There is zero downside to getting way more efficient on cost if that's something you can achieve. 29:45 It's kinda like the zero downside to managing your calories well. There's zero downsides to exercising more. Um, but there might be impediments to doing that. 29:53 There might be kind of, I don't know, um, some sort of growth issue. There might be some sort of physical issue. So, like, what's the right answer for you depends. 30:01 If you're a large incumbent institution, you might have all kinds of issues with the regulator hanging over you if you tried to let go of seventy percent of your staff tomorrow like Elon did, right? 30:10 Like, that's, that's not something that's, that's a possibility. So depends what your starting point is. I don't think there's a right answer. 30:18 I also think that a second thing is true, which is financial services will still warrant being a service for most people most of the time. 30:26 If you said to CFOs, uh, "Imagine if you could have the world's best performance coach of being a CFO with you twenty-four/seven, um, and some large language model creates an unlock for that," I think they would want it. 30:39 Uh, the question is will that work and will that be effective? 30:43 But, uh, that's kind of the next wave of, of like- LLMs putting the services back into financial services, uh, but at a cost model that is not necessarily a commodity because I don't think that is a commodity. 30:56 I think it's at a quality. Like, the service should be about quality and the product should be about the commodity or the price and those are two different things. 31:05 So they're two ends of a spectrum, but there's no downside to being more efficient. As somebody who just waffled on for like, uh, 90 seconds to an ans- to a very simple question, I envy that efficiency. I definitely do. 31:17 Got it. Yeah, and do you think that there's often misdirection in financial services? Do you get that feeling ever? I think the issue is systemic. 31:25 I don't think there's one evil overlord going, "Ha ha, look at me misdirecting you. Ha, I am going to misdirect you over here." I think it's endemic to the business model, right? 31:33 So financial services revenue is like a pin cushion if you have a high cost structure. Soon as somebody, regulators squish down one area, fees are gonna pop up somewhere else because they have to be profitable. 31:44 Like, they're gonna find it and they're not necessarily doing so creatively and they're not able to cut structural cost out of their business fast enough to, to meaningfully make sense. 31:53 And then there's like just this spider's web of other regulations they've gotta manage whenever they do it, so their choices are very, very limited. 32:01 But there is definitely an arbitrage where the lowest FICO scores end up paying the highest levels of interest. 32:08 The other side of the spectrum in the credit card industry, you've got higher income consumers who are paying off their entire bill and getting rewards and that wealth transfer is, is negative. 32:18 But again, I think that issue is systemic and you're gonna struggle to solve it without redefining what a bank is and its purpose in society, which is a fundamentally difficult thing to do. 32:29 So it does perform that function, but not through intention. I think it's by accident. 32:36 The best way to disrupt it if you can't go rewrite all of the laws of the land is probably to go attack the cost element of it and generally that's what fintech has done. 32:45 At sometimes though, some of those experiments end up in being, you know, sort of compliance failures and I think that balance of never losing that North Star is, is really, really important. Yeah. 32:56 I, I really enjoy this, Simon. Well, thank you, Brandon, for joining me. Efficient as ever. 33:00 This will probably be the shortest interview, so I encourage you listeners to listen to this a couple more times 'cause there's a lot of compressed wisdom coming out of Brandon. And thank you for listening, of course. 33:11 If you like this, remember to tell your friends, leave a review on the podcast. It does help others find the show. You can find me @sytaylor on Twitter and the blog at fintechbrainfood.com. 33:20 Where can people find out more about Miaow and, uh, yourself, Brandon? I'm really proud of this. We're now miaow.com, uh, C-O-M. 33:28 [laughs] We used to be miaow.co and that was a huge boon for us in terms of like channels and stuff like that. So yeah, just visit us at miaow.com. If you come into the intercom widget, odds are you'll talk to me. 33:37 [laughs] So that would be a great way to chat. Awesome. All right. Thanks very much. 33:41 [outro music]
