MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Revolutionizing FinTech Ventures Through AI Innovation with Drew Glover
Unlock the secrets of building a successful business with Drew Glover, co-founder of Fiat Growth and general partner at Fiat Ventures. Drew's journey from growing up in the Bay Area and attending UC Berkeley to making a significant impact in the venture capital world is nothing short of inspiring. Alongside co-founder Alex Harris, Drew has identified groundbreaking opportunities in the fintech space, focusing on improving financial health for underserved populations. Learn how they evolved from a growth consultancy into a venture fund by securing unique contractual rights to invest in the companies they advised, creating a perfect blend of consultancy and investment.
Shift your perspective on tech investments as Drew delves into the transition from consumer-focused strategies to B2B and B2B2C infrastructure investing. Discover why businesses are now prioritizing fewer, more significant partnerships over mass user acquisition to achieve product-market fit more rapidly. We also explore the role of data analytics in modern marketing and the transformative power of AI. From enhancing customer service at companies like Klarna to making AI tools accessible to small businesses, Drew shares insights from recent discussions with Congress, shedding light on the future of marketing technology.
Financial literacy and wealth management are more critical than ever with the impending wealth transfer from baby boomers. Drew highlights the importance of financial education for younger generations and the role fintech solutions play in supporting diverse populations. Whether you're aiming to build a venture-backed company or a successful bootstrapped business, Drew offers invaluable advice on assembling an exceptional team, crafting a compelling vision, and mastering early-stage sales. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge and an inspiring mantra about the power of creating the life you want.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:I am so thrilled to have Drew Glover on the show today. Drew, you have been in startup world tech, world product so many different areas of it for so long and now, of course, you're founding partner of Fiat Growth and general partner at Fiat Ventures. What prompted you to get into this industry? Besides, I also saw you went to Berkeley, to Cal, for your undergrad and your grad, so you're obviously in the zone and in the area, but I'd love to hear more about your background and what led you to finding and funding and creating this vision of how VC can be different.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, thanks for asking. And you know my background's a little different. I'd say it's pretty non-traditional Grew up in the Bay Area, born and bred here, lived in New York for maybe a year in between after graduating college, but I went to UC Berkeley and coming out of UC Berkeley, I was just a big proponent of, you know, finding my path to really start my own venture and I was lucky enough. Throughout my career, I did a number of different things. I was in sales and I was lucky enough. Throughout my career, I did a number of different things. I was in sales, I was in insurance, I was a cooking category manager at a food startup. I took a lot of pride in just trying a lot of different things and I found my way into the fintech space and my background my family very civic, oriented, very much focused on impact as well as also just building like a really good life for yourselves. And they didn't need to be mutually exclusive. And this was probably my seventh or eighth job.
Speaker 3:But I started working for a company called Steady helps folks in the 1099 world improve their financial health, reconnected with a close friend of mine from Cal. He was at Chime, the large neobank, where he was doing a very similar role where he was really overseeing marketing and growth and strategic partnerships, and we saw this huge opportunity on two sides. One is is we realized that fintech was specifically an area where you could make the most impact on the world positive impact and also we saw it as a burgeoning space, both from the direct to consumer standpoint as well as the B2B standpoint as well, and so Alex and I Alex Harris is my co-founder we started co-advising a number of companies together and, while we still had our full-time jobs, we were working with all these different businesses that needed growth help, specifically in the fintech space, specifically that had VCs that were focused on making a larger impact on the world, specifically the 80% of America that needed the most financial help and guidance and literacy, and we saw this opportunity in the space specifically around driving growth services to these businesses. As you know, a couple of years ago we were living in this very different economy I always talk about it as the momentum economy where it was growth by any means necessary. We were seeing multi-hundred million dollar rounds, companies scaling up, becoming unicorns within six to eight months. It was a crazy time. We were really focused on making it, so these companies were scaling with cost-efficient strategies around growth marketing, around performance marketing, around affiliate partnerships. I could go down the list and Alex and myself, through this process, we said, hey, let's start working with a number of these companies.
Speaker 3:What started out as two companies turned into 10, turned into 15. Long story short, we quit our day jobs. We founded Fiat Growth and was really one of the first growth consultancies specifically focused on the fintech space. Fintech has complicated products. It was our goal from a messaging perspective to make it simpler product and also to make it so we can scale these companies up.
Speaker 3:But through that, when we started Fiat Growth, we had one mandatory rule is every company we worked with, we would get the contractual right to invest in their next funding round. That was our foray into actually founding Fiat Ventures a couple years later, where we only worked with companies that we thought were investable. We only worked with companies that we really believed in and they had a thesis around making an impact. And a couple years later, we had worked with around 80 companies. We had around 65 rights to invest in some of the coolest, sexiest companies in the market and we went out and raised the venture fund, started raising in 2021, closed our first venture fund, a $25 million venture fund, in 2022, brought on Marcos Fernandez, who was a longtime advisor to Fiat Growth, to be our managing partner, and so after closing that round we realized we really created this unique ecosystem in the venture space.
Speaker 3:We had Fiat Growth, our consultancy that also doubled as a due diligence arm because a lot of the companies we were investing in were companies that we worked with and had the right to invest in. Then we had Fiat Ventures, where we were able to actually invest in the companies that excited us the most. So today Fiat Ventures around 60% of our investments are companies that we previously worked with at Fiat Growth and then the other 40% are companies that are just doing really incredible things in the space that we want to back with our dollars. So it's been a really fun journey, but I will say it's been a very untraditional path into venture and I will also state, you know, as a very proud African-American man, it has been one that I've been ultra proud of, just because of the lack of diversity in the venture space and just really in tech in general 100%, and that's one of the things I definitely wanted to touch on, because I worked with a lot of startups.
Speaker 2:I've worked with some fintech startups and I've seen how they've had to go through transition. I've worked with black founded fintech startups as well and seen the ecosystem and repositioning. Or okay, now we won this startup fund, but we have to move here to get this million dollars, and now we need to pivot a little bit on our strategy. And so I think what you do on the growth side is really important in the space in general, because I think that's not where a lot of founders probably are. Their mind is not necessarily at that. How do we use digital tools, affiliates, collaborations, advertising all of those sectors to get visible? Right, whether it's B2B or B2C, but then also flagging the fact that minority entrepreneurs and particularly VC world it's such like what under 2% funding.
Speaker 2:So you really like shot. You know all of those things. You're the like poster child for here's what you can do and here's how you can have success. So I just have to, first of all, applaud that, and I'd love to hear how you decide what companies are worth working with. Yes, a lot of companies have a social good component. They have something they really want to change in the world, but not all of them know how to get there effectively. So is it that you see that they really are earnest, that you think it's achievable and that you know the strategy side to help get them there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the best part about our very unique model is, again, we get to work with a lot of these companies prior to investment and there's so many things you learn about the product, the business model, the founder dynamics, how they manage money, how they raise money, how they recruit talent.
Speaker 3:Do people believe in their vision and will, by any means necessary kind of like travel with them into the darkness of like what the entrepreneurial journey is. And so, again, because we don't come from this traditional VC background, our story doesn't start by us working at Accel or Andreessen for 15 years prior to starting our fund. It actually comes from us being operators and being able to run our own diligence and underwrite deals based on us doing work with these founders in the trenches. So, first and foremost, yes, like the thesis of what they're building and the idea is very important to us. But once we love that. That's the easy part, because there's so many great ideas out there.
Speaker 3:The hard part is getting in the trenches with these teams and these founders to understand if they're built to last. You know there's a level of doggedness and grit and relentlessness. You need, especially in these early stage companies, to know that 90% of the time, the idea that we sought out to build and scale isn't the idea that becomes the billion dollar business. These founders and these teams are having to tactfully pivot throughout their journey based on macro and micro market dynamics. Maybe there's something that happens from the regulatory standpoint that makes it so they have to change their business model. But there's all these things that we don't have control of that ultimately impact the end product. That is, the product that hits product market fit and scales to the moon.
Speaker 3:So for us we really lean on the fiat growth side of our business to help us underwrite opportunities and you know we're typically working with a company from three, six, sometimes even 12 months prior to investment.
Speaker 3:And coming out of that experience, we're working very closely with fiat ventures to bring all that qualitative and quantitative knowledge that we've gained from working with them to then make a really thoughtful decision around if we want to invest in them. I think a lot of misnomers is like if you have a VC fund, you just have unlimited shots on goal, like just investing and one of them will hit Out of a $25 million fund we made the decisions even as we were raising with our investors. We're doing 26, at most 27 investments, which means you know whenever we make an investment that's one less investment we get to make. So obviously we probably talk to 2000 companies a year. That's like over the last three years that we've been deploying out of our fund we have 27 winners that we get to choose and we lean on fiat growth to make it so we can de-risk that investment as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't even imagine what a daunting undertaking that is, because everybody wants funding, everybody needs funding and not everybody knows how to approach that. Either If you don't have connections right, you don't know how people will say this is actually how you need to do a pitch deck, or here are the people that you should really be going after. When you're trying to start a business and you're running it, you don't necessarily have time to think about all those other things, even though they're really important. So I know that you work with a lot of partnerships, not just between your two companies, but having built up your companies with a partner, you worked with other companies and kind of. I'd love to hear about partnerships and how important they are and how people can start to understand the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think partnerships they become so much more important than they were a couple of years ago, and that's been because of a pretty large shift in the type of businesses people are investing in today. A couple of years ago, I always explained it as the call it consumer layer of tech, where we were investing a ton of money in consumer products. You know, this is a money management tool. This is an investment tool, like again, like a Robin Hood or an Acorns or something like that. What we moved into now is this infrastructure investing, where people are investing in a lot more into B2B businesses or B2B2C businesses. It might be an API that we're trying to sell into a large bank. It might be an investment tool that we're trying to sell into every single wealth manager in the world, but we're selling our business into other businesses, and what that means is, instead of you having to go get 10, 20, a million users to prove out your product, what you need to do is you need to get like five to 10 really massive businesses you can sell it into and, as you know, like if you are a business and you get Microsoft as a client, then all of a sudden, you could be seen as a multi hundred million dollar or even a billion dollar business where, with a consumer product, you just need to get hundreds of thousands of users that are fully onboarded.
Speaker 3:So the business models have shifted here. But now, in this B2B world, partnerships are so important because if you get two or three, five to 10, 10 to 20 meaningful partnerships, that changes the success of your business, that changes the outlook of your business. It also means your path to product market fit is that much quicker. It also means you can fundraise that much quicker. So now that we've seen this shift in the market, we're seeing the importance of partnerships and we're seeing the importance of sales. We're seeing this uptick in how people are building their teams and how they're building their infrastructure around their teams. Paid marketing and some of these other marketing strategies still remain wildly important, but in terms of being able to move the dial to success of your business, partnerships are playing a much larger role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and obviously that's something that you help organizations with when they come to Fiat Growth and then if they make it into the venture side as well, yeah, that's right. I mean so, yeah, fiat Growth and then if they make it into the venture side as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right, I mean. So, yeah, fiat Growth specifically, we are a full stack agency. We call ourselves a consultancy because we are both strategy as well as execution. But when it comes to this kind of full stack agency component, we're doing everything from affiliate partnerships, strategic partnerships. We're running all performance marketing that's across Meta and Instagram and Google and Reddit. I could go down the list.
Speaker 3:Lifecycle marketing so, again, someone might sign up for your app but then they might never use it. Lifecycle marketing is really making it so we're not only retaining them as a user or a client, but we're also making it so they become product obsessed with whatever you built. We also have a creative arm of our business where we're doing all the ad creative and then also standing up your MarTech stack. So data and analytics have become wildly important in marketing. You know, marketing has shifted from back in the day where hey, great, we have a couple million dollars, let's go put commercials out on television. Now marketers are actually data scientists Like it's the ones that can collect data in the most efficient way, analyze it in the most efficient way and then actually drive strategy from that data. So when I say we build up your MarTech stack, that is bringing in platforms like Snowflake or HubSpot or Iterable or Amplitude, and being able to fully understand the customer journey, pull that data out to then put it back in the market as we deploy marketing dollars in the most effective ways.
Speaker 2:And I've seen or I've heard that a lot of the VC funding right now is going towards AI companies, and of course, we know AI has been around a lot longer than everybody realizes, but since Chowdhury, pt and OpenAI, that's really when it entered the zeitgeist right, and our conversation is coming at a very fortuitous time.
Speaker 2:I was just in DC last week with Intuit Small Business Council speaking to Congress members about the need for small businesses all over to have access to AI tools to help streamline their MarTech stacks, their ad tech, their just general efficiencies general efficiencies and we heard from Congress members that they've had a series of nine focus groups where they brought experts in to talk about these issues, and so it's something you're aware of. But of course, we know things move slowly and they might not completely understand the technology. But I'd love to hear what you're seeing on your side of things with AI and this new revolution. Right Of okay, ai isn't everything we do, because I know Intuit is using it in a big way between MailChimp and QuickBooks and the different ecosystems and how they figure out who is fundable or not as a company or who they can give loans to, and so I'd love to hear your perspective and what you're seeing on your side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's some confusion around what an AI company is. I think a lot of folks are constantly saying what's going to be the next AI company. I actually think a lot of the infrastructure, at least for the next 10 to 15 years here has already been built. Yeah, there's the open AI, there's the open AI for government, there's the open AI for some of these like really large infrastructure players. Really, where we're at now is how can we use these really large platforms to enable the products we already have, and so even what we're seeing in our own portfolio? We don't have a lot of quote unquote AI companies, but every single one of our companies has embedded AI into their existing infrastructure. That could be in a million different forms. It could be used for customer service, which we've seen companies like Klarna do, where they had 700 employees doing customer service and now they're bringing in a number of different AI technologies to make it so. That is a fully digitized AI-driven experience. Again, that doesn't mean Klarna is an AI company. It just means AI is enabling the efficiency of that business, especially as they look towards being a public company. So that's the biggest thing for me is I am most excited about investing in businesses that are utilizing AI as an unfair advantage versus trying to focus on building a competitor to chat, gpt or open AI. And so we're seeing this in a lot of different spaces.
Speaker 3:In the fintech space, I think, like obvious ones. We're seeing it in insurance like insurance has a wild amount of data we're thinking about how do I underwrite life insurance, how do I underwrite car insurance, how can I do that in a more efficient way, where you can just put in your first last name and where you live and that's enough information for them to spit back, like the most competitive insurance prices. We're seeing it in customer service. We're seeing it in workflows service. We're seeing it in workflows.
Speaker 3:Where wouldn't it be great, instead of you having to fill out that worksheet when you sit down at the DMV or when you sit down to go to the doctor, but you could just literally put in two or three pieces of information and, because of all the information they have, they can automatically fill everything out for you. Again, these are very rudimentary examples, but it's really helpful to hear of. Like there's so many things that are manual processes that can quickly turn into instant processes just simply through AI, and it goes much deeper than that but again, like AI within finance, within your day-to-day life, as long as every single company has the same amount of access to the infrastructure of AI, they can use it to enable a much more delightful experience for all their users and all their clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with FHIR can be more on the strategy side of things and able to execute, versus having to live in the world of the menial tasks that we hope AI can take over for us.
Speaker 3:That's 100% right. That's 100% right. And again, what we're trying to do here, like in the simplest form, is we're trying to take what historically has been unstructured data and be able to structure that through enablement of AI and then being able to turn that data into recommendations and insights for you. We want people to be less so administrators and more so overseers of knowledge. I think AI is really helping push the evolution of that in a really special way.
Speaker 2:One of the things that you mentioned is the affiliate side and partnerships. We have the affiliate ecosystem and that's a place where obviously, yes, okay, there might be some AI influencers, but for the most part, that's still one-to-one recommendations. It's people who people trust to make these recommendations, or companies that they trust to make these recommendations to them. So I'd love to hear about the affiliate partnerships and why that's an important part of your ecosystem as well.
Speaker 3:Well, affiliate partnerships is very much, I think, one of the most cost-efficient channels to stand up. It's also one of the most underutilized one, and so the reason why it's so cost-efficient is, if you're spending money from a paid performance perspective, you need to spend money to test the market, to understand how to make money. With affiliate partnerships, we can get really tactical in terms of the different partners that we want to forge a relationship with, and we can get tactical with the specific audience or personas that that company finds most valuable to them, a good example being like Airbnb. Airbnb wants to get in front of people that are maybe looking for a different experience when it comes to travel. We're also looking to get in front of people that have enough income to actually go travel. So, as I keep going down the list here, maybe there's a certain age, right. People in their early 30s to early 40s are the ones looking to travel.
Speaker 3:What you hear me doing is I'm building a specific persona of the type of user that Airbnb wants to get in front of. Once I get that persona, at that point, as an affiliate marketer, I have the ability to go look at the entire digital landscape and go see the different type of publishers or websites that fit that persona. Maybe I go to Travel and Leisure, because that is a publication, an online publication, specifically around people that want to travel, like that perfectly fits the persona that I'm trying to sell to. I can go to Travel and Leisure and I can say listen, airbnb is willing to spend $50 for anybody that signs up on their website. We would love to build a relationship where you write about Airbnb often and we are able to build an affiliate relationship where every single time someone follows a link on Travel and Leisure, comes to Airbnb and signs up with that link, we'll pay you $50. Again, the best part of that is is travel and leisure says yes, but we're only going to pay you if someone comes to that site and so that brand is able to pinpoint the event that is most valuable to them being signing up on Airbnb and only pay out when that event is triggered by a user.
Speaker 3:Where a lot of these other marketing channels, again you're having to pay up front. So it's a great channel to stand up, but it's also one of the more efficient ones and every single brand should be diversifying their channel mix. You should be spending money on Facebook. You should be spending money on Google and Instagram, but the ultimate goal is is how do we make it so we can stand up four or five different channels over the span of a couple of years and all of them are optimized and all of them are scaled up? The biggest fear for any brand is if you only have, you're only spending money on Facebook. That's the only channel that works and Facebook shuts down tomorrow. That means the business shuts down. So we have to be really thoughtful and strategic in terms of how we stand up growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I'm a very big believer in Peso and integrated marketing strategies. I tell this to my students at USC all the time. If all of your social media went away, if you don't have everybody captured who is a potential customer you know their email address, they haven't gone to your website then you lose all of that data and that information. Going back to what you're seeing about data, we live in a society where we needed the storytelling, the authenticity and the human touch, but we also need all of this great data so we can marry them together to find the best match.
Speaker 2:I love that you mentioned a magazine partnership, because we know that most of these publications now need these affiliate models to survive because they're not getting as much straight ad revenue as they used to be, so it's a win-win A hundred percent. Yeah, do you also partner with content creators, influencers, people like that? Are you primarily sticking to the big guns?
Speaker 3:So we do. A lot of the content creators we partner with are specifically for user-generated content. One of the big trends that we've seen over the last couple of years here is it's much more effective when you see an ad from an influencer or someone that you might follow on a social media platform telling you that this product is much more exciting. So there's two different sides here. One is just like pure influencer marketing, where I reach out to an influencer, say I'll pay you X amount of dollars to do a post. There's another one where I say, hey, I actually want you to be the talent in my commercial and I want that commercial to look and feel like you were doing an influencer review, and that becomes the long tail marketing strategy for the business.
Speaker 3:So we'll do a little bit of both. Sometimes we will simply forge those relationships with an influencer and just pay them up front for, like, a sponsored post, but other times we'll actually say, hey, here is the content that we want to put forth for this brand and we want your sponsored post to double as the actual ad that we're going to push across multiple platforms, because we are seeing that that organic look of someone speaking directly into Canberra confidently, truly believing in your product, is the most effective way to specifically sell like direct to consumer products, sometimes B2B as well. If you have like a CFO selling ERP software, you want that individual talking directly to you about why that's the best product for you to use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting how that landscape has changed from professionally produced content that looks very professional and in studio to now going back to that authenticity, that genuineness. So I'd love to hear, if you don't mind, sharing a favorite Fiat growth project and strategy. And then I know this is like choosing one of your favorite children but a company on Fiat Ventures side that you invested in, that you've seen, really surpassed your expectations even.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's not too hard of a question. Actually, one of the ones at Fiat Growth that we're always just super proud of is a company called Sunday Sunday Home Buyers.
Speaker 3:It is a real estate company where it's kind of like the model that we buy your ugly home and then we flip it so they kind of cut out realtor commissions and they will purchase your home and then they'll put some money into it and then basically resell it. Call it like five to, at the most, 10% on the flip. But we basically took over their marketing and we had to find these very competitive ways of marketing them across the country, specifically on top of some of, like, the largest real estate companies and individual realtors. And so we tried a million different things. And again, marketing is a game of test and iterate, test and iterate, and it's also running cheat tests. So we can do a lot to figure out what works the best test, so we can do a lot to figure out what works the best. And through a number of different tests and iterations, we landed on this strategy where we would go to individual cities and we would see who the top real estate agents were in those cities and we'd actually put money behind that real estate agent's name. So if you were one of the best realtors in Oakland, California, we'd say, great, let's actually put money behind your name as the keyword and make it so if anyone looked you up, we'd actually see Sunday pop up right above you, and it turned out to be an incredible acquisition strategy because it was also a literacy tool where a lot of these folks were quickly realizing that you could sell your house for less because we were bypassing a lot of the real estate fees and also we're paying in cash. So that was very enticing, specifically as we are in the middle.
Speaker 3:I always call it age tech, but like this wealth transition where a lot of 65 plusers are looking to sell their home and the main thing they need is liquidity, so anybody that's willing to sell in cash and also make it so it's a much more affordable process is the most exciting opportunity for them. So you know, Sunday's a Series D company now, but we were working with them when they were Series A and you know that strategy alone is was one of those. You know I hate using this term, but I'll use it a growth hack that really propelled them to exponential scale, which was really exciting. One of the other companies that we worked with actually they remain nameless, but they are a financial OS platform, so an operating system for a number of different industries.
Speaker 3:But one thing that's really interesting is that LinkedIn has actually become a really large growth platform for a lot of especially early stage founders where if you're a B2B business and you are able to situate yourself as a thought leader in the space, then you'll actually turn your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn exposure into a huge lead magnet for you.
Speaker 3:So we actually worked with one of those founders to actually just build out their entire profile and write a ton of LinkedIn content for them, and we did a couple posts a week. And we get on the phone with that individual every single week for 30 minutes, ask them a slew of questions about themselves, their business, what makes their business special. We turn those into posts and we post them and what that would do is, all of a sudden, this person was getting inbound on LinkedIn saying I love what you're building. This is super interesting. I think this company needs it. I think that company needs it, and so I think constantly we're seeing these different platforms pop up that you wouldn't think are a actual lead magnet but are turning into one of those growth channels that you can't really deny.
Speaker 3:And so that was again like Sunday's. A large company, but the people that need the most help a lot of times are these really early stage, pre-seed seed companies that need to project themselves as bigger than they are, project the problem that they're solving are as big as they actually are, but their team is only a couple people and it's founder-led sales. So those ways to make them feel and look bigger and be thought leaders in the space become a really important piece of their general growth over time.
Speaker 2:And that is such a better strategy than getting cold DMs, maybe from an AI chatbot in your LinkedIn profile with somebody who says they want to add value, and then they just spam you with what they want to sell you in the next email. I love that you're doing that and using that approach to really build actual thought leadership and to really show who this person is. I get great things coming to me from LinkedIn in terms of like invitations to. I got an invitation to go to an AI conference in August and then now I'm like, okay, let me see if I can speak at it, right. So really, really cool fun things and based on my words or what I'm posting and that's what I want, those things and that's exactly what you're doing in that ecosystem that you're creating, so kudos.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you, yeah, creating so kudos. Thank you, thank you, yeah, I think.
Speaker 2:LinkedIn is wildly underutilized in the world or misused.
Speaker 3:The ghostwriting market is going to be one to look out for. There's going to be a lot of people. We've all felt it right. Like, no matter how good of a writer you are, it's very nerve wracking to write about yourself and write about what you're building and like publish it. And so there's an opportunity for businesses to exist, to get people over that barrier where they can one day do it themselves.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the generational divide in terms of you talked about how there's this generation that's looking at other homes and maybe they're ready to move on and we know there's going to be a big wealth transfer. We also have Gen Z, gen Alpha, like all these younger generations that have used technology. I mean, I'm Gen X, so I definitely grew up in a very different time of technology and had to adapt, because this is what I do for a living and it's been fantastic. But how do you differentiate, when you're looking at your various company portfolio, which ones you want to market to which generations and how you disseminate the marketing?
Speaker 3:That's one of the things I love most about the VC side of the business is I get front row exposure to where money and people's relationship with money. I can tell you a couple of things. One is he's getting younger. Kids are getting exposure to money at a very early age now and it's forcing them to learn about money. I think there's a huge opportunity to really hone in on what's most important about money Earning, saving and investing and setting yourself up for at least knowing how to build generational wealth over time.
Speaker 3:So I think there's a huge opportunity in the fintech space, specifically around financial literacy, financial health and making sure that when folks have money, they actually understand what to do with it, and we're seeing that as early as literally like the age of like eight or nine Now, okay, they're getting money from their parents, they're getting their allowance money in digital forms and there's ways for them to manage that.
Speaker 3:I also think because of this wealth transfer and we're seeing reports of 15,000 people a day retiring now there's this new wave and, again, the boomers have over 30% of the world's wealth right now and there's a huge opportunity to help them build a new relationship with how they want to engage with money post-retirement. That's something as simple as trust in wills and making sure that those are like fully built all the way over to properly managing their money to do the things that they want to do post-retirement and also, as they want to set up a nesting for the next generation of their families, and doing that in a way that is as thoughtful, as efficient as they want it to be. So I see huge opportunities on both sides of the world, right the earliest stages, the latest of stages, and currently spending a lot of time talking to a lot of companies that are building to solve for both challenges.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we know that digital literacy is an issue financial literacy or whatever vernacular you want to use Some people don't like that word attached but it's so important, as you talked about earlier, to change the dynamic and create.
Speaker 2:I teach grad school at USC, but I do still have a lot of students who are first generation and it's really beautiful to see that they get to achieve this dream. But I also know how expensive it is to go to university, right, and I don't know that they're all getting the financial education to make the right decisions. I know I certainly am always learning, so I'm interested to hear about that, because I think that's even a different dynamic. Is what if somebody lives in an area where there's not only food desert but there's not good Wi-Fi, right? How do they access these tools if they don't have a school district that's going to teach them? So I'm hoping that some of the systems that you're working in are going to help solve for some of this, because those are the people who really, really need it and need to understand that they can get out of whatever situation generationally they're in and be the change makers, right, but they have to have this foundation if you're talking about starting when they're six, seven, eight years old.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, first and foremost, I think the future of work is getting younger as well, finding ways to earn money at a much younger age. Huge believer that earning money and managing money products need to collide at that intersection, to me, I think it's very unfair to go tell a ton of people that we're going to help you manage money, especially if you're the 80% of America that doesn't have $500 in savings in case of an emergency. So the lead always is like we want to help you earn money, so we can help you manage money. And a lot of the businesses that we try to work with, if that is not their core focus, we need to know that it's very much on the near-term product roadmap to make it so that there is a collision in between managing and earning. I think saving and investing is a part of that. That, to me, is like the quad that's most important here Earning, managing, saving, investing. Unless you're solving, there could be a lead in your product that's bringing people through the funnel, but you need to be solving for all of that to make it so. Even the most at-risk populations are leaning into engaging with your products Because, keep in mind, the majority of money management tools are free.
Speaker 3:They're direct-to-consumer apps. Their goal isn't to monetize on the user coming in. It's to monetize on a user over time. The hope is for any bank. Checking a savings account is a loss leader for them. You buying your first house with them is what they're spending all their time and effort in building the relationship. So the good thing is is like the digital bank and like the digital, like the financial infrastructure that's being built online is they're very much following that path of.
Speaker 3:We want to invest heavily in building the relationship so we can get some of these larger opportunities later on to build a really profitable business. The big difference is is checking and savings is not financial literacy. What needs to be built up front is a very different type of onboarding process for the first 10 years of the relationship, and that is what is changing quite a bit here, and also, I think, by a lot of these products building for younger ages call it teens, or even earlier than teens. They're being forced to drive people into their product in different ways and a lot of times that is the literacy component.
Speaker 3:A great example being is like all these things keep happening in the crypto markets and I don't care how old you are, you've heard about crypto Right, and an uninformed person playing around in the crypto markets is a very dangerous person, and so we're constantly trying to make it so, like even the things that might seem like it's a adult content from a financial standpoint. We have to remember that the youth today is highly educated and highly exposed and has access to information at the tip of their fingers, and so we are starting to treat some of these younger kids like adults, but we're giving them the messaging of that content that matches the age that they are. So sorry to go back to your question, though, yes, we are focused on working with products that are touching the things that these kids need the most, but also making sure that we're building the infrastructure that will keep them inside of that ecosystem as long as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is one of my areas that I'm very passionate about, so I can talk to you probably all day and just keep asking you questions, but I know that we're almost at the end of our time. I wanted to find out about building your team, because you do on the growth side. There aren't a lot of agencies that do everything like you do, right? So what was the intentionality behind being full service and also figuring out who the right team members are to play in this field with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so first we say full stack, we say full service. There's many services that we don't offer that sometimes our clients need, and so we do have a really great partnership ecosystem where we're constantly passing them over to the right expert. But we do do a lot, and that was not something that we did from day one. My co-founder and I, we started this business as an affiliate partnership business. That changed it to strategic partnerships.
Speaker 3:Those were our superpowers, but we oversaw in previous lives full marketing teams of very large businesses, and so over time, as we kept having clients asking us for different services, we would basically just start hiring the folks that we wish we could have hired house once upon a time.
Speaker 3:So what we have today is we have a team just over 30 people that are comprised of some of the most senior execution first markers that we had in our network, and that was something that we did on a piece by piece basis, because we consistently as marketers we try to do this all the time as well with our clients is we let the market tell us what they need, and so when we would get an overwhelming amount of hey, I wish you guys did this, I wish you did this Over the span of a couple quarters. We'd look at each other and say we got to go make this higher and we got to build out this service because our clients need it. And it's always better when you're able to offer a one-stop shop with really incredible service than you kind of having to piecemeal together your team of experts. Because, coming back to the data point is you want one team overseeing the data and translating that data into action.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You start to lose some of your edge when one team's owning the data and then dispersing that out to people, because we all look at data differently, some people better than others. So from our perspective, we have always wanted to build a team of the best experts and specialists that have access to a core piece of data for our client, and then we can all work together and collaborate on how to best turn those insights into action within our marketing strategies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. I think that is what everybody should be doing, and hopefully that is the world we will see. One of my last questions for you is what advice would you have for somebody who is looking to enter the world of startup, and particularly with the FinTech area that you're an expert in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, first I'll tell you this Three, four years ago, when the market was as frothy as it was, I saw a lot of people entering the world that just thought it was the quickest path to wealth. That was a moment in time. That has never been the entrepreneurial journey. The entrepreneurial journey is one where you need to be impassioned, you need to be excited, you need to be a genuinely nice person, but you also need to be dogged and relentless and never give up.
Speaker 3:And so I would just quickly say, like you just need to be dogged and relentless and never give up. And so I would just quickly say, like you just need to be built to fail a lot. Fail fast, learn fast, always get up and just keep grinding. And I'm really happy to see, like in this, in this new market we're seeing, where I'm seeing a lot of founders like that Nice. Some of them are second time, some of them are third time. A lot of them are first time as well, but they're entering it being like I'm ready to sit down in the seat for the next 15 years and see this thing through a potential IPO or whatever their ultimate goal is. And then I would also just state that you really need to be able to do a couple things. You need to be able to recruit a really incredible team and make it so your vision is something that people want to follow. You need to make sure that you can sell. You need to be able to sell the product that you're building the early days, like you getting to product market fit, you getting your business to a really good place. Like you're going to need to get those first 5, 10, 15 customers or whatever thousand users. Last but not least, I will say this to anyone starting a business Decide right now if you want to build a billion dollar business which is great, that's a venture backed business or if you want to build a business that is just really successful it doesn't need to be a billion dollar business. Both are great businesses.
Speaker 3:You, owning a business that's doing $20 million a year that is not venture backed, that is bootstrapped. You are a multi-multi-billion dollar business Exactly you raising venture funds and trying to become a billion dollar business. You're gonna operate on a deficit for the next 10 years. You're gonna have a lot of people on your board telling you to do different things. You're going to have a lot of people on your board telling you to do different things. You're going to have to manage that board. You're going to have hundreds of people in your company and you're going to scale up and you're ultimately going to need to become a CEO of a massive business. Both are very exciting journeys, but ask yourself that question and commit to at least like the early stages. Commit to what you want to do, because it will significantly change how you view the growth and scale of your business. It'll be very helpful to you to understand what the North Star you're following is.
Speaker 2:That's great advice, thank you. Yeah, I love that, and we're sending people to Fiat Growth to find out more about how they can work with you. I know that you have specific avatars of people that you like to work with. You've talked about a few things, but is there anything else that you'd like to mention before somebody takes that leap?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess a couple of things. What is Fiat Growth is a couple of things. What is Fiat Growth? Our core services, keep in mind. We're typically working with companies at Fiat Growth that are really ready to get prepared to scale, so that's typically like a seed company or a series A company that's really looking to take it to the next level. But we work with pre-seed and seed companies, even idea stage businesses as well, but we do that a lot of time through Fiat advisors, and so we have a little over 200 advisors that we work closely with. A lot of them have full-time jobs, but they're looking for ways to do like call it like side gigs that are specific to their area of expertise, and we connect those folks to really early stage founders. It's also a very affordable path for you to be able to get the strategy and execution help that you need. So, regardless of your size, please reach out to us if you're interested in learning anything about growth or looking to scale your business up in a meaningful way.
Speaker 2:And Drew, do you have a favorite quote? Mantra, family, motto, some words that help you like stay excited about every day.
Speaker 3:Yes, I do. One of my favorite quotes I heard recently is if you don't like the life you've created, create a new one.
Speaker 2:That's powerful.
Speaker 3:Everyone has the power and the ability to create their life, the life they live in, and you have the ability to curate your own world, and so just because you're not happy with something doesn't mean you have to live in it. You just simply have to create something new.
Speaker 2:It might be one little step at a time, but you could do it. True, this has been a really fun, engaging and informational conversation, so I really appreciate your time. I know the audience does as well, so thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you Such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I'll be back again with another amazing guest shortly to distill their information that will help you be better at life, at business, at everything that we are trying to do in this crazy world.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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