EP2: Bo Jiang, founder/CEO Lithic ($800m), on building Privacy.com and pivoting to Lithic which provides easy to use card issuing APIs to make money programmable

Conversation with Bo Jiang - founder and CEO of Lithic, which offers an API for card issuing. We talk about Bo's incredible journey starting out as a consumer focussed company (Privacy.com), and pivoting to Lithic, which is an easy to use API for card issuing. 

Today, Lithic is one of the fastest growing company in Fintech and recently announced a Series C at an $800m valuation. In this conversation, we focus on the early days and pivotal moments in Bo's journey. 

Episode Highlights:

1. Growing up in the midwest
2. How Bo got started building products
3. Story and insight that led to Privacy.com
4. Challenges building on a legacy processor
5. Anatomy of a card transaction - acceptance vs issuance
6. Why they built their own infrastructure for issuance
7. Lightbulb moment to pivot from Privacy.com to Lithic
8. Programmable money and new use cases the Lithic API enables
9. Impact of Covid - metrics and remote work
10. Thoughts and reflections on crypto 

Links:

• Follow Bo on Twitter @bolingj
• Read this terrific analysis on Not Boring to learn more about Lithic
• Check out the Lithic website to explore use cases and get started with the API, and Privacy.com for personal payments
• Lithic is growing fast and hiring across almost all areas -- explore their open opportunities

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Transcript

0:07  
You're listening to paradigm shifts, a podcast about turning points in careers, lives and companies. My name is Ashish. And I'm joined by my co host, Zane. And we're excited to talk to Bo Chang who runs lithic, a company which offers a credit card issuing API. So Bo, I want to get started and talk about your background. Can you talk about how you got into software?

0:30  
Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. By the way, I got into software and building products in middle school and high school Actually, I started working with my co founders back, when we were in high school, I grew up down the street in the Midwest, from my co founder, Jason. And we were like one of the two kids, you know, in high school, building websites together and just kind of hit it off. My other co founder, David actually grew up in the UK, and we actually met online, or like, our 13 year olds, building websites together, didn't meet in person while we were in our 20s. For us, like we were just always interested in building products and putting it out there for people to use. It was kind of this intrinsic thing that we found, like really interesting and fun. They've kind of been doing it for most of our lives.

1:15  
What was the first product you built? That was not just a website, but something you felt like, Hey, this is a real product, I could build more of these things.

1:21  
Yeah. So we built sort of an early box competitor back in like the mid 2000s. And I think that was like the really first product that we built. And I was like, wow, this is like a real business. They're real people using it. And this is really awesome. And to just give you a sense of like, timing, I think this is in boxes. So like consumer product. So yeah, kind of definitely kind of dating myself a little bit there. Yeah,

1:45  
that's amazing. It's rare for people to meet their co founders that early and cultivate that interest in the skill sets, building software and products together.

1:54  
Yeah, I think in many ways, we're super fortunate to have started working together and just had sort of this mutual interest in building stuff. And that sort of stayed pretty consistent over the years, just in terms of the motivators for us.

2:09  
And it was basically the same team along the way from like the box competitor to all the future projects, all the way up through privacy analytic. Yeah. So

2:17  
we sort of collaborated on and off, you know, at various points, like, you know, went to school and worked at different companies and stuff like that. But yeah, pretty consistent thread. Over the years. I've just kind of collaborated on and off. And I think, skill set wise, we've complemented each other really well. So that's been really great.

2:35  
Awesome. And how do you guys know each other? I don't think I know the backstory for how you and Ashish met. I know you guys are friends. Yeah, you're a longtime.

2:43  
The story about how Bo and I know each other is in 2010. ish. I moved to Boston because I'd graduated from college 2009. And my wife was going to med school, they're my girlfriend back then wife now. And I was working out of an office called dogpatch labs that was run by Polaris ventures. And Bo, I think you were also working from there at some point, or at least stopping by. And that's how we met. And we just kind of hit it off. And we'd grab like lunches occasionally. And I moved out to SF, and we weren't keeping in touch as regularly. And then years down the road. I was working at DuckDuckGo. And one of the things that I was working on was partnerships, just like new partnerships is figuring out how we could support other products or how we could grow. or somehow it occurred to me that like one, see what goes up to these days. And then two, I realized he was running privacy. And so I reached out to him. I was like, yo, what's going on? We should catch up. It was really fortuitous, and kind of funny. Ever since then we've been in touch very regularly, which has been wonderful. That my missing any details, though?

3:46  
No, I think you pretty much hit it on the head. I think you were working on like an actual company back then, you know, we were kind of tinkering around with a bunch of ideas. I don't even remember the specific product or idea that we were hearing on back then. But connected back in Boston. I think we kind of lost touch for a couple years and totally coincidentally, ended up in the same space. That's amazing.

4:11  
So on this podcast, we like to talk about learning moments or inflection points in your journey. Right. So it's sort of an old adage that you there's a lot of overnight success that takes like 10 plus years. And I think your story shows some of that, right? You've been working on various projects and startups for like over 10 years. And for us now you're like very successful, but I'm sure there are many, many hard moments. So as you think back before we get into like specifics, what's kept you going all this time through all the ups and downs like how have you started, like kept yourself focused and just continued on?

4:42  
That's great question then. still lots of wood to chop or were more successful than we were 10 years ago, but saw a lot of work to do. I think about it kind of in phases of growth for the company, early on, a lot of what kept me going was kind of the people that I was working with. So that First, and then I think on some level like a lack of perceived optionality, which is something that is harder actually, scarcer, resource wise, when you're older, right. Because as you get older and you know, you progress down like a career path, you start to actually have really high opportunity costs. And like a lot of options, you know, you have a lot of options. And I think like, early on, like I actually didn't really know what kind of options I had, which sounds kind of silly, these days, you come out of school, and if you have a CS degree from a good school, you can get like a really high paying job at a tech company. And I think back when I was just starting out, that wasn't actually quite as clear. And so there's an element of just like, you enjoy what you're doing. And building with the people also, like the options just aren't as appealing. And I think the second phase, like when you have product market fit, and you have something that's working, a lot of it just comes down to like, this is the first time I've done x. And it's like, really interesting, it's really new. How do you build or run like a 30 person company versus like a 10 person company. So they're these like, really new and interesting learning experiences, that just makes it so that you never really have a boring moment. And that's really what keeps me going. And a lot of ways, you know, obviously, talking to customers, and knowing that we're building something useful is super motivating as well. But I think if I think down like a lot of it just comes down to sort of learning and your experiences.

6:25  
So going back, let's start at the pre product market phase. So I think the privacy project, it was sort of your big initial project, right that you spend most of your time on. So walk us through some of that, like how what got you working on privacy like eight years ago, it wasn't quite as front and center as it is today. Now of course, Apple is all about privacy. And, and Dr. Gilbert Ashish works is all about it. But but back then it was sort of like a contrarian in some ways, right? This is like, the big companies in tech, we're just big. So what got you working on privacy? And would love to hear that early story and start there?

6:57  
Yeah, absolutely. I kind of got into it by accident, I left my first job, and started dabbling in crypto. This is like, 2012 2013 ish timeframe. And that's how I got interested in the world of privacy. I think crypto is really early in a bunch of different dimensions, but just raising people's awareness of it's kind of mind boggling that the three of us are talking to each other on, you know, supercomputers, you know, around the country. But when we buy things online, it's still this, like super unsafe and not consumer friendly method of like carrying around a piece of plastic and punching in like 16 digit numbers into a computer, right? What if money was like programmable and sued anonymous interests inherently like much more secure. And at the same time, like I think, if you think back even a few years ago, is pretty clear that with the cloud, the cost of computing, the costs of storage, was dropping really, really rapidly. And so the net effect of that, and it's still unfolding today is that everything that you do online, can be stored tracked in is basically searchable for a very long time, just because that cost has gone down significantly. I think we're still kind of seeing the second order knock on effects of that happening. I don't know if we've sort of quite as society like grappled that even though there's been all this like, sort of outrage about like, Privacy Practices of like bigger companies. So we kind of keyed in on that. I think the other gap that we notice and thought that there was a need for was that there weren't really that many tools and products out there that were both privacy forward and kept you safe. And also like really accessible and easy to use. And so Originally, we actually thought that, hey, maybe there's an opportunity here to build like a whole suite of tools that keep you safe online, but are also really accessible. So think about when I say like privacy and security tools, even today, what comes to mind is like products that are like kind of hard to use, stuck in the 80s, from an interface perspective, probably charge you like a $10 a month fee and are of questionable quality, right? There's no sort of Gmail esque experience. For the most part, there's some companies that are definitely doing a better job and innovating on that front. But that was sort of the unlock originally for us and sort of getting into the privacy space.

9:20  
Yeah, the one product I think of in that space is like a password manager. It took me years to start using it. And now it's like, you know, like I can live without it. So how did how did you guys have to think about all the different products you could build? Because there's like a broad spectrum there. Right. And you landed on something very novel, I think. So tell us about what privacy was and how you set a lens.

9:39  
So one of the things when we were thinking about this space, we were interested in FinTech that was sort of a kernel from the crypto world, but also like, what are the products out there that have built in monetization that doesn't require selling your data advertising? And I think a big piece of the accessibility is like, you know, we don't sell your data, but ideally, we can also like Make it free and accessible, right? And payments kind of came to mind because there's this really nice built in monetization in the form of interchange, and other types of services traditionally, like banks and other financial companies provide, that's where we originally started out and the preview a little bit we've, you know, fast forward now seven years, and we're still in the payment space. But you know, the original idea is like, let's start in this space. And you know, we can expand out over time and build a full suite. Obviously, that's her original vision and perspective has been derailed a little bit

10:32  
is looking back, you were kind of at this intersection of massive trends, right? One was people's data being stored online diminishing costs of collecting and storing data, like you mentioned, and the second was ecommerce accelerating, right. So like, people spending money online was just starting to go through the roof, too. So what was the privacy product? What did it do initially,

10:50  
basically, the experience is very much like a password manager. So anytime you, you know, sign up, you install the browser extension or the mobile app. And anytime you go to a checkout page, you can click a button and get a brand new card number set limits on it close anytime you want. It's really good for a myriad of use cases beyond just privacy. We found for example, if you have kids, it's great for you know, making sure that they don't spend like 1000 bucks on fortnight skins or something like that, right? We were pretty fortunate in that we'd raise some venture money for the business. But it was pretty self sustainable and just kind of grew organically from a product market fit perspective. A lot of people spend a bunch of time like kind of in that idea maze, trying to iterate and try to find product market fit with our consumer product we kind of just stumbled into I wish I could say like we had some framework for iterating, scientifically, but honestly, we launched it and there was kind of immediate, like demand for it. And we were very fortunate in that sense.

11:52  
How did you know it was working? Then how did you start getting customers? If you have like a Google plugin or something, the customer acquisition tends to be the hard part in a lot of FinTech companies. Right. So curious about how you crossed that hurdle. And what drove that continued growth,

12:06  
we kind of hit upon like this early adopter crowd that just has continued to grow. And, you know, I think when you look at like FinTech companies, there are companies, like many Neo banks, that target like a very mass market, where we found is we have a relatively niche market for the privacy consumer product, but it continues to grow and is like, very efficient. And that's driven like a lot of our strategy around how we scale a business and how we spend, instead of spending a bunch of money on Facebook ads or other types of like paid acquisition, we focus on making sure that product just like runs really well. And the growth has like historically, kind of just taking care of itself. Like we do spend some money on ads, but I think on the order of like 70 80% of our growth is just organic and word of mouth. So it's people telling their friends about it.

12:59  
And so the original product was a credit based product, right? Or was it a debit product? So you would sign up, you'd link your bank account? And then would you like transfer money integrate a bunch of debit numbers or credit numbers?

13:10  
Yeah, so it was it was a debit product? Yeah,

13:13  
I think a big milestone for a lot of folks tends to be like the path where you're cashflow positive, or like breakeven, ramen profitable. How long did it take you guys to get there? And here's to hear how that changed your thinking when you when you got to that point,

13:26  
say like, we were very fortunate. And anyways, from the product market fit perspective. But from the unit economics perspective, what we found was we were building on top of this legacy processor. And we actually ended up having to build our own infrastructure, from a product reliability perspective, and also from a unit economics perspective to get things right. Which is kind of insane, in sort of hindsight. So it actually took us a number of years to really sort of get the unit economics in a good spot, I think, probably wasn't until, like, you know, we launched in 2015. And I don't think we were really happy with them until like, probably 2017 2018 when we sort of built our own processing and controlled infrastructure. And do you mind elaborating on what that involves, just for people who aren't as deep in FinTech? If you think about the anatomy of a card transaction, there's two sides to it, right? There's a acquiring side and the API's and the infrastructure for accepting cards. There's been a ton of innovation on the Accept card acceptance side, you know, companies like stripe and Braintree, add yen, square and Shopify. And so that's, that's one side of it API's and companies that make it really easy for anyone to accept payments. On the other side of it is like sort of the card issuance for the card creation side. And I think in general, like there's been relatively less innovation on the card issuance side of things. And so what we ended up having to do was to build your infrastructure stack for creating cards programmatically. So that means like, keeping track of like balances, decoding the message that merchants send up through Visa or MasterCard, you know, PCI compliance, a lot of the stuff around moving money, except on the h1 side, we actually had to build in house.

15:15  
Yeah. So tell us about that. What did that take? Because there's a lot of regulatory stuff, there's a lot of working with big legacy companies that are probably not the easiest to work with. So what was that process? Like? What got you to the realization that, hey, we got to build our own infrastructure? And how long did that take? What were some of the hurdles?

15:32  
Yeah, we were sort of early to the realization that we needed to build our own infrastructure, because specifically, our product doesn't quite work like a bunch of other products out there, right. So we have the concept of multiple cards per account, we have spending limits, we add locking to certain merchants, we have like a bunch of basically, like, if you think about it, like, we essentially allow you as a consumer, to program your card via a like point and click interface. And so that sort of threw up a bunch of different hurdles towards like, you know, scaling on top of a third party legacy provider early on, it was fine, you know, we had errors every now and then. And it was fine. Because, you know, maybe we had a couple 100 customers, but as you start scaling millions and millions of dollars in volume, or hundreds and billions, it starts to become really painful, like, you know, 1% error rate, because, you know, a certain action isn't being handled correctly by your underlying infrastructure provider. And so we realized that, and there was a bit of youthful and naivete there on our part, where we were like, oh, like, you know, how hard can it be to build our own processor? And, you know, we originally thought that it would take like, three to six months, and it would be a bit, you know, it would be a significant lift, but not like incredibly painful, right? Turns out, it actually takes like, you know, on, it took us at least on the order of like two years to do it. And required buy in from a bunch of different stakeholders, like older companies, a bunch of sort of certifications, we did have to, you know, be fully PCI compliant. Where sock two, just in terms of like, the overhead, it is very, very significant.

17:11  
How big was your team at the time, it was the three co founders, and all three of you were building this,

17:15  
we were a little bit bigger than three at that point, I think we were maybe, let's say we were maybe around 20 people.

17:22  
Oh, wow. Okay, that's pretty big and thin. So how much capital that you raised at that point, I assume the core product at that moment was doing pretty well. And you were sort of at the point where you weren't making money on the core product, but you knew if you build this infrastructure, you would and so it was kind of like a must do kind of thing, I want to say

17:38  
we'd raise probably around three or $4 million at that point. Not a lot in today's world. So that doesn't mean a lot. Yeah, it's like a seed round that in today's world, for sure.

17:49  
So I had a related question, which was, you knew from the get go, that you were building in a regulated, slow moving space, massive space, but also has a lot of hurdles to get through? How did that influence your fundraising strategy,

18:02  
we rarely turned away capital in rounds, you know, in today's environment, it kind of actually makes sense to keep round sizes smaller relative to valuation, because I think there's an expectation that you can raise more quickly, or raise on a more rapid cadence. But we sort of always budgeted and took more capital than we thought we needed. Round sizes are just, we're just much smaller than so even though we did that, it doesn't get reflected in today's world. But yeah, we definitely sort of budgeted for for extra and every round.

18:35  
So going back to the journey, so you start privacy calm. So you start getting some early traction, it's really strong, but high startup issue rate and unit economics are poor, because you're reliant on these, like old credit card issuers. And so you build your own infrastructure. Now you're like, maybe like three years into the journey, at what point you realize that there's like, a bigger opportunity to go after the the issuing API driven issuing kind of use case. So take us through that and what that realization was like and how you sort of navigate with some of that change.

19:06  
Everyone says, like, you know, as early stage company, as a startup, you should be laser focused. And I think it's possible to take that advice in perspective, like too far, our consumer product privacy, comm is a huge opportunity. But this whole time, we were kind of building this infrastructure. We constantly be getting requests from developers and you know, other companies about like, hey, like, you know, we see that you're issuing virtual cards, can we just use your API's? We were always like maniacally focus, you know, and said, No, in hindsight, like, you know, I think we probably could have picked up on that demand faster. If we'd been just a little bit more open minded, obviously, hindsight is 2020. And it's difficult to replay the chest moves. But I think that the turning point for us was when we found that there was a developer that actually reverse engineer our mobile API's to get access To our basically card created API. So we have a mobile app. And you can obviously create cards from it. And so we had a developer that actually reverse engineered it. And that was like a lightbulb moment of like, Whoa, like, if that's not product market fit, where you have people literally, like, you know, going after your undocumented API's, like what is right, basically, we took that are like, okay, hey, like, we know, in building sort of our own issuer processor, like how painful This is, we've also scaled and built a product on top of a legacy processor. And we know how bad that is. So I think we kind of put all the pieces together, like, okay, there's definitely a huge opportunity here to basically take what we've built for ourselves, and open it up to the broader world, because there's obviously like, just a massive, gaping hole in the market right now. And who better to solve it than us. And because we've kind of built this already for ourselves. And that's sort of what prompted us to, like, go out and raise our series A and basically, you know, the story there was like, this is a little unusual, but like, you know, we've built this business that's doing great, we're raising a series A, to definitely invest in the current business, but also because we want to run this experiment, because there's this like, really interesting opportunity that I think we'd be remiss if we didn't explore and, you know, sort of dig in more on sort of the b2b side, it definitely made raising our series a more challenging, it was a really difficult and weird story to tell, you know, to series A investors but, you know, to their credit team, or the ventures, really kind of got it, they ended up leading our series A Yeah, it was a tough enough story that like, I think we got passed on by like, pretty much every major VC in the valley, probably in New York as well. That's par for the course. Right? in Canada. Absolutely. Yeah, I think in particular, our story of like, hey, like we had, we think we have something here, at least in in the environment that we were raising in, made things, right, specially interesting.

22:02  
How long did the race take? Was it a couple of months? Was it longer? And what would have happened? If you hadn't done the raise? How badly Did you need the capital to keep investing and building the Olympic business,

22:11  
it would have been really painful. If we hadn't raised the capital, many I don't think we could have, we definitely couldn't have run as quickly without it. I think we tried twice, actually, for the series A and failed once. And the second process probably took like six months, it was pretty brutal.

22:27  
Wow. And you feel like that first go at it helped. Because you know, at that point, it is almost like that first go out and educates the investor market little bit. And the second time you start to build some momentum from that first data point, that helper is kind of very curious.

22:42  
I don't think it helped that much. I think it helped in terms of getting reps in and telling the story and sort of working on tightening it. But aside from that, I don't think it was particularly helpful. I think all things equal, you always want to run a fundraiser quick and stronger and tighter. It's sort of conventional wisdom for good reason. Back then,

23:04  
if everything went perfectly, what was the blue sky vision? And how well does that line up with knowing what you know? Now

23:11  
back then, and one of the reasons why we had a bit of a challenge was like, we were raising our series A in order to experiment. And we said, Hey, like, we think there's this really interesting opportunity. But we didn't really paint in, in many ways, like, there wasn't like, you know, marquetta is IPO, in many ways has sort of made the story a lot crisper for the opportunity on the issuing side. But, you know, I think we ourselves like thought that, hey, if we made this a lot easier, a lot more modern, a lot more accessible. A lot of companies will be built on our API and platform. But we actually didn't really have like specific use cases, right? Like the on demand. Card issuance use case wasn't as clear neobanks weren't as big, right. But I think in many ways, like, you know, it just was less clear what the market opportunity was. And it's clearer now. But I still think by focusing on verticals like we're kind of underselling it. Ultimately, the way I think about it is like, if you take something that's super expensive and slow, and make it like self serve, pay as you go and really accessible. You're not betting on like a specific vertical, you're betting on developer creativity, or like, you know, ingenuity, and that was like asymmetric upside, and it's like, super, super exciting. We've gotten better at telling that story. But early on, I think it was really like, Hey, we have this consumer product, it's doing really well. We also have an infrastructure piece that it feels like there's a really strong poll on, but we just like can't really quantify it. And so it was almost this like, weird half baked seed pitch. And so I think a lot of folks saw that and we're like, hey, like this doesn't walk and talk like our typical series a deal. And so I can only write one or two checks a year and then I pass

24:59  
so What are the the big use cases that you've seen so far? And what are some that you're particularly excited about?

25:04  
Yeah, so I think there's kind of two categories of use cases. The first is b2b payments, depending on what stat you look at something like 70 80% of b2b payments are still done like over check in a CH today. And I don't think 100% of that is going to move over to card or digital. But there's this really interesting way right now where everyone knows that software is eating the world, and software is definitely eating the back office. And along with that, like they're all software's also digitizing payments. And so do you think you'll see like a significant portion of that, like 70% of b2b volume, get pushed over to cards. And so we see a number of use cases where like, there's this procurement platform, and today, they're doing things via checks in a CH, but like, they could probably push 10% of that volume over to cards. And it's kind of a no brainer to do that for everyone. That's one category, like broadly, like b2b payments. Another area that like I'm really excited about is like, sort of this verticalization of banking services. And if you think about it, it's kind of interesting that like, today, there's something like 4000, you know, banks and credit unions in the US, the big four really, really kind of dominate market share. What's interesting is like the big four, they sort of have this one size fits all approach, and it doesn't necessarily work well for everyone, right? If you think about like, you know, company, like chime, for example, has kind of keyed in on Hey, like, big banks don't do a really good job of servicing folks that are lower income, and the fee structure that overdrafts like, you know, the fact that like, you don't, you can get your paycheck two days earlier, they really kind of keyed in on that. And they'll a product tailored towards lower income folks. And I think you're just gonna see that like verticalization, across the board, where like, they're now banking services focus on like creators, because they have different needs, and their incomes are lumpier. They have like specific tax needs, right? That'll be like a really interesting thing to play out and see, see, like, you know, what, verticals really kind of grow over the next couple years,

27:21  
or that's happening already. Like they think this like this really successful up and coming bank called oxygen for contractors and freelancers. There's this time there's like, there's a bunch of them totally, the way you think about it is those are your customers. So those those new sort of like banking products, and then they use you for card issuing? Because you've got the best developer experience and like the fastest, most modern sort of like API.

27:45  
Yeah, exactly. I mean, for us, the three pillars are fast onboarding, really easy to understand pricing to go with that onboarding, and will scale with you as you grow. So I think a lot of times, what happens is like, as you scale, these legacy players can't really keep up, either, because there's a existing construct where they need to manage the bank relationship. And it's like an all in one package. Whereas as you scale, you want to move more to an all a cart model, or because like their tech stack, literally just can't keep up. You know, when you look at like stuff like balance checks and new features that get rolled out by the network's a lot of the legacy players kind of have challenges keeping up

28:28  
the card issuing is all debit today, or is it credit as well, we can

28:31  
do credit as well. But we don't provide the ledgering for credit. So you sort of have to bring a core. And we work with a number of folks on that

28:40  
to the b2b use case, I run a shipping marketplace where you can buy freight, and a lot of our customers are b2b customers. And they increasingly pay with credit cards and debit cards. And so to your point, a lot of that spend, which used to be sort of like cash and cheque and payment terms is moving to like a pay as you go model. And from from my perspective, as someone who runs one of these marketplaces, if someone pays with the debit card, I would much rather have that than a credit card, because it's just like much less chances of a chargeback and fraud and stuff like that. So I can definitely see an opportunity for a number of folks to build sort of more privacy conscious checkout flows, that build on what you have, and the clear sort of like when when across all stakeholders.

29:22  
What kind of scale is the business at now? And then what do you think the market opportunity sizes?

29:27  
Were? It's super early still. So you know, we're 10s of millions of cards, billions and volume. But when you look at the TAM, right, depending on sort of what estimates you'd look at, like, I'm trying to do like $10 trillion over like credit debit prepaid in the US alone, the next couple of years, so worth like super, super early innings. I think what's really, really mind boggling is that when you look at card volumes today, like the vast majority of that still runs on infrastructure, from companies that were founded in the 80s So I actually think the interesting opportunity is like, you know, less about like taking market share from the legacy players, but more about like, what kind of like net new use cases get created. Because we've kind of taken something that's historically like expensive and you know, made it made it a lot more accessible.

30:19  
Awesome. So switching gears a little bit, would love to chat about two other things. So one is how COVID affected you guys. So what was what was the impact of COVID? on your on your business in your team? And what are your thoughts looking forward? and curious to hear how that affected you?

30:32  
Yeah, it's it's definitely top of mind, I think this topic that, you know, everyone's kind of talking about right now. COVID was obviously super challenging from like, just say, the world is kind of melting down perspective. But I think from a business metrics perspective, it was definitely an accelerant for us in terms of just like digital payments, e commerce, just across the board, like, did sort of supercharged things. And then, you know, as a company, I think it also pushed us because we were, you know, historically, like very new york centric, and probably wouldn't have explored like, second sites remote, as much our philosophy was, like, let's innovate on like, the core thing that we're innovating on, not necessarily on company structure, and, like, be super innovative there and kind of go with what's tried and true. Yeah, it really kind of pushed us to experiment more there to hire remotely. And I think, you know, generally speaking, like, our philosophy has been like, this is like, a massive experiment that we're going through, you know, as a country as a, as you know, this world, right. And so we're gonna be like, pretty flexible, and kind of just nimble and try a lot of different things. Some things won't work, and we'll try to fix them quickly. But it's really hard to say like, you know, what the future of work is gonna look like, you know, in two, three years, and when, when hopefully, things really kind of normalize, we're definitely sort of leaning more into like a remote friendly culture. Now, as with most companies, we're definitely not requiring like everyone to go back to the office. And in some ways, like hiring remotely like we've, we've kind of started that course, probably like six or nine months ago, when we started doing it.

32:13  
Yeah, once you start hiring remotely, then you can really go back right, you're committed? Yeah. So one other topic that I think you have a lot of interesting thoughts on, and I think experience and it's crypto. So it's something we didn't talk about was how way back when you were getting started. You explored some crypto ideas? What were your impressions on on crypto back then? Clearly, you were excited? What did you find? And how do you think about it today? Because it's come a long ways. And I would love to hear any of your reflections on crypto and your thoughts looking forward? Yeah, I

32:42  
think the thing that was most interesting to me, and still is most interesting to me about crypto is that, like, if you think about what crypto is, it's, it's effectively programmable money. That's what we're trying to do on traditional payment rails today to make money programmable effectively. So that continues to be really interesting. I think my challenge with crypto has been that when you think about the phase of development, crypto isn't now I still think about it as like kind of this like researchy phase, where the clear use cases, at least in the US haven't really emerge. For me. That's I think, my biggest challenge and ultimately, like why I sort of didn't spend as much time in crypto back in the early days, obviously, TBD. You know, I think that this story is very much yet to be written. And I think it'll be interesting to see what comes of it. But for me, personally, I've always been kind of interested in sort of the applications of technology. And so I have kind of yet to see that and no, I could, you know, clarity that like I feel compelling with crypto,

33:48  
right. Any specific use cases that you're interested in are excited about right now? There's so many, right, there's so many things being talked about and explored.

33:55  
I think the most interesting ones will be like cross border use cases, like I still find that to be really interesting for crypto and in part because it's kind of an end run around regulation. That makes it kind of a gray space, but also something that crypto is kind of uniquely positioned to enable men to kind of force I don't know, I think there's so many other use cases. There are so early like the collectibles and stuff like that, that. I don't know where it's gonna go, but I'm excited to see.

34:23  
Yeah, awesome. I had one one last question. What's like a really interesting book you read recently that you'd recommend. I'm looking for some new books. I'm running through my list pretty quick. So

34:32  
any recommendations fantasy series that I read that I really enjoyed was the dagger and the coin, it's got kind of a nice blend of like, gaming Game of Thrones II type content. Plus, like some banking stuff, like super interesting. I highly recommend if you're if you're interested in FinTech and banking, both thanks so much for joining us. It

34:54  
was really, really interesting conversation. And I love talking to you because you're so hyper intelligent. And you're so humble and you keep it real, really excited to follow the journey. And thanks again for joining. Thanks for having me.

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