Muslim Money Talk
Introducing the Muslim Money Talk Podcast, a place for all things Muslim and Money related.
Every week we'll be sitting down with Founders, leaders and industry experts from across multiple disciplines to discuss lessons learned, mistakes made and most importantly 'How they did it?'.
Brought to you by Kestrl: The Muslim Money App, software to help Muslims grow their wealth without compromise. Find out more here: https://kestrl.io/
Muslim Money Talk
How Will AI CHANGE Islamic Finance For Good? | Salman Hussein - Muslim Money Talk Ep 26
In this episode of Muslim Money Talk, Salman Hussein, co-founder of Zeed, discusses the intersection of AI, fintech, and Muslim values, explaining how personalised financial content can empower retail investors. The conversation also delves into entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and the transformative potential of AI in reshaping industries and faith-based engagement.
This podcast is powered by Kestrl.
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Show Notes:
00:00 – Opening
03:24 – From trading to founding: the key inspiration and leap into startups.
08:38 – Early challenges and successes: fundraising and building Zeed’s vision.
14:40 – Innovative AI applications: financial podcasts, broker calls, and content generation.
19:45 – Tackling AI challenges: hallucinations, bias, and delivering accurate personalization.
26:07 – How AI is reshaping finance and its potential impact on the Muslim world.
39:00 – Broader implications of AI: jobs, economics, and societal shifts.
52:56 – Zeed’s rebrand announcement and its future focus on empowering institutions.
Definitely wouldn't say that I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, always wanted to be a startup founder. It is simply something that came up one time and I decided yeah, this is what I want to do. It was born out of believing that there was a new way that people would interact with market information to help them in their investment decision-making process.
Speaker 2:AI artificial intelligence claims they're going to add 15.7 trillion to the global economy just through AI and robotics by 2030. Do you think that's overblown or realistic.
Speaker 1:It's not overblown at all. I was going to say maybe it's an underestimate.
Speaker 2:Really, yeah Gosh. In today's episode, I'm joined by Salman Hussain, ai expert and the co-founder. Can I call you an AI expert?
Speaker 1:I really hate people going by expert when they're like not done 10,000 hours, you've definitely done 10,000 hours. Maybe I'm not counting, but I know experts, so that's the thing, okay. So I respect them enough to not call myself an expert, as much as I love it, and I'm trying to become better at this stuff, yeah.
Speaker 2:Don't call me an expert AI experts and the co-founder of Zeed, which is a retail investing app that uses AI and video content to educate and engage its users. We talk about everything from AI to how it might affect the Muslim world in general, how Zeed is actually revolutionizing the way that financial retail investors consume their content and other applications of AI in the financial services world. As always, I'm your host, areeb Siddiqui, and this is Muslim Money Talk. Before we begin, we actually noticed only about 10% of you are subscribed to the podcast, so if you like what you're listening to and you want to hear more from us and see more things Muslim and money related, then please consider subscribing and, of course, leaving this episode a like and share it with your friends. Leave us a comment or a review, because it really really does help us out and help more people to find us. Thank you. Now back to the show. Assalamu alaikum, salman, welcome to the show. What did you say? It like that I?
Speaker 1:don't know. You just caught me off guard. You had so much energy I was like I didn't know why he was going to. It's the beginning of the episode.
Speaker 2:It's the beginning of the show. We're going to start it off on a high right. Well, thanks for joining us. I know you don't do many of these.
Speaker 1:Oh, that was it you actually started.
Speaker 2:I thought you deign to you know come down.
Speaker 1:Come on down, dear friend, I would uh, I would do it.
Speaker 2:I think neither was pulling this, pulling the strings in the background. Yeah, he has, he has yeah, he's been out. He's our mutual, he's our mutual connect yeah, I mean, if you haven't checked out neither of ours episode, do check it out. I think it's episode nine or ten, um, but it's one of my favorite episodes of all time that we did because he went super deep into so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had no idea about any of that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, neither, it just caught me completely off guard with it. But yeah, I really the whole idea that he thought he was too brown for banking and then ended up heading up from barclays rise innovation, so crazy. Anyway, it's not about Nader, it's about you. I wish it was. We should get him involved.
Speaker 2:I know, but so there's loads that I want to cover with you. I want to be talking about AI where it's going, what it could be doing in the financial services community as well as for Muslims as a whole, as well as talking about your own story as a founder within the fintech space, as an AI expert as well.
Speaker 1:Let's not push it, let's not push it, let's not push it. But yeah, I'd love to speak about it.
Speaker 2:But let's start at the beginning, because we know you now as the co-founder and the CEO of Zeed, which is a very exciting fintech, a retail investing app that uses AI and video content to educate and engage investors. Bang on, bang on. There you go. It's almost like I got it from the website. But how did it all start? Where did the idea for Zeed begin? Did you always know you wanted to go into entrepreneurship?
Speaker 1:No, no, I definitely wouldn't say that I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, always wanted to be a startup founder. It is simply something that came up one time and I decided, yeah, this is what I want to do. And that came through, I think, having experienced a lot in industry and then subsequently figuring out a lot about that industry and then having a real view on where I thought that was going.
Speaker 2:So you were working in assets and wealth management before I was working as a trader.
Speaker 1:Okay, a trader. Okay, I was working as a trader, and it gives you a lot of insight into risk-taking, into the way that people think about financial markets, and we we knew a lot of people that were passionate about investing, myself being one of them. A lot of my friends, my co-founder, and so we were fascinated about the, with the way that people consume information that ultimately leads to them making investment decisions okay and that's what it was born out of.
Speaker 1:It was born out of believing that there was a new way that people would interact with market information to help them in their investment decision making process.
Speaker 2:What were those insights that you learned? There was it. Did you see a whole sway that people going out to social media to learn about investing?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, at the time, it was hugely social media driven, um, and we thought that was good for some reasons, bad for other reasons, um, but we thought the most important thing was engagement, um, actually getting people to consume this stuff, understand this stuff and subsequently make informed decisions based on what they're consuming and something. And fundamentally, we want them just to be comfortable with the outcome. Right, we don't want people to say, oh, I read this thing, I didn't really understand it, but I did something anyway, and then now, six months, one year, five years later you know, I wish I knew this thing, like if if I knew that, then I wouldn't have done this right.
Speaker 1:We want to prevent that feeling. We want people to say I knew all of these things. My investment may have gone down, but at least I'm comfortable with it right. And that's the real tricky part of investing being comfortable with risk-taking. That's what we're trying to help people do, okay. We want people to understand the risks, understand the company they're investing in or the asset class, and that only really makes sense when you have the full picture.
Speaker 1:Okay, when the content that you consume has a full picture about you, and you have the full picture about the thing that you're interested in in relation to the other things.
Speaker 2:And you learned all of this on the trade floor as a trader. No, absolutely not Okay, but that's what inspired you.
Speaker 1:Trading gave me a lot of experience into a sector.
Speaker 2:And which company was this for?
Speaker 1:It used to be called VCM2.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It's now rebranded as DARE.
Speaker 2:DARE, which is a prop trading firm. And was that the first thing you did out of uni? It was yeah. I did it during uni and then I did it post uni.
Speaker 1:Okay, and you were at imperial, weren't you? I was at imperial, yeah, nice, doing anything in ai. Or yeah, my master's in machine learning? Okay. So I did my undergrad in uh, kind of like computer science. And then my fourth year I just did everything was ai, it was machine learning, all of my modules were machine learning and then my focus was mainly on reinforcement learning so slightly different to um, to llms and similar, but what's reinforcement?
Speaker 2:did you say reinforcement, reinforcement, learning yeah, so reinforcement learning is.
Speaker 1:Is is actually heavily used in uh, in lms as well, through reinforcement learning rlhf. So reinforcement learning human, I believe, is what it stands for. Okay, but it's basically that if you take something and you put it into the world and it interacts with a bunch of different states through taking actions, it gets a reward based on that and it can use that reward to learn about the environment it's in. It gets a reward, like the system.
Speaker 2:So just think of a reward, like the system. So it's just think of a game, okay, um, but think of a maze. But the system itself you've almost like built in a dopamine response and yeah exactly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the best way is thinking of a, of a maze thinking of an object that's trying to navigate to the middle, and the reward can be something like how far you are from from the end goal, right, and so you're trying to optimize on based on your actions you can take. You're trying to learn how to solve a maze, sure, without knowing anything about what mazes are or anything.
Speaker 2:All you know is you can go up, down, left, right down, um, and so that's like a broad way of thinking about it, but that isn't used in wider domain, so okay, yeah, sorry, no, no, no, very cool, that's something, um, but the idea is that you took what you learned at uni. You also had your own passion for trading and investment and you were working in that space and somehow that coalesced with you deciding to make the jump, to take the leap, to start your own thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe I should have one third final part of that okay which probably fills in the gaps. Yeah, me and my co-founder and a couple of our friends, we used to run a community, um, which was a content community of people that used to contribute um written articles and research about finance.
Speaker 1:Um, everybody was at uni, everybody was at all the top business schools in the world all the top business programs and economics programs in the world, and they would contribute written research and articles to a centralized place that we would then publish. The idea wasn't really for the sake of publishing. It was for the sake of connecting with other people and sharing investment ideas, sharing views on markets and things like that so you did this whilst you were at imperial? Yeah, it's just like a fun little yeah how did you run this community?
Speaker 1:was it like a big telegram group or we ran it like a proper organization, so we had these like management structures and people like heads of teams and we'd all report in and have like weekly catch-ups, monthly catch-ups, and we had we built a system where people contribute their things and it gets shared to. People had a podcast. We had like there's all these things had a podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay, um, it's still out there today it's still out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it did really well. I think it was like top 10 podcasts for business and finance in wow in the uk for like a while. Yeah, we did a lot of content um through that um. So that's the missing piece. So that's what connected um content with people, with our experiences in banking and finance, and then also the ai machine learnings.
Speaker 2:All of that stuff comes together into to create z, to create z and what we're doing now. Yeah, so your co-founder, ron rohan? Yeah, you met him at uni.
Speaker 1:No, no, I went to school over here, oh okay yeah, where did you guys go to school?
Speaker 2:where do you grow up?
Speaker 1:to uh, both in south london. Okay, we both lived incredibly far from our school so we both lived an hour in different narrations. Actually, me and ryan live like very far apart, um, but uh, yeah, we went to school in orpington, which is pretty pretty good school, okay, um, and uh, we both went to uni in london. So whilst he was at ucr, I was at imperial.
Speaker 2:We lived together a couple years, nice, so we were proper lifelong friends then and then yeah yeah, decided to to start this yeah what was the inspiration point then? Like, what was the the tipping point where you thought I've had enough, let me leave my full-time job and let's start a company?
Speaker 1:it's a good question. I think for us it was really about risk and reward, um, which is, I think, slightly different to how a lot of people get, gets, get like, decide to take the leap right. For us, we just we knew that the risk reward was in our favor from doing this right why, how?
Speaker 2:how did you know that?
Speaker 1:if you look at the opportunity costs, you look at all of these things yeah even though we were in some of the highest paying industries, highest paying career paths even then, right the upside from that you get from startups as an, as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as an early employee, etc.
Speaker 2:It was just enormous, like if you run the numbers right, even if, even if you account for the rate of failure and all of these things if you net out everything, you're still up, even if you account for the rate of failure, yeah, where 95% of the startups fail in the first year.
Speaker 1:Not because of the outcome that you get from the startup, from the career progression that you would also have otherwise.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Right, so I think there's studies on this. Um, if you, let's say, you just carried on in a role, um, and you were there, for two years and instead, in those two years, you did a startup, you failed. You come back right. You would have gained like four or five years of experience and seniority in that same period, right. So no matter, however you spin it, especially if I'm taking from a UK perspective you're up.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That's one of the ways that we are looking at it, and but it was that combined with we really like this, Like we really want to do this. Yeah, for sure we really see opportunity here, we really have conviction in the space that we're after.
Speaker 2:I think it's a forgotten safety net that if you can't afford to take some time out from from work to do a startup, that even if it does fail, you'll either accelerate when you go back into your old job, or loads of massive companies, from tech to finance to consulting, love to hire failed entrepreneurs. It's just rate of learning.
Speaker 1:I think that's what I don't really I know I said all that stuff. I don't really view it like that just really about rate of learning. You want to be in a place where you learn the fastest and we believe that you look you, you learn faster in startups from first-hand experience. Um, we didn't know it completely, but looking back, it's one million percent no, I have to agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I learned more in the first like three to four months of running a startup than I did in the entire time of business school and all of that. It's a crazy learning curve. Yeah, so you guys ran the numbers, you thought we should do this, you handed in your notice and what was Rohan doing?
Speaker 1:Rohan was working for a fintech.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So he had a few roles. He started working for fintech Can't remember if it was at the fintech at the time or the private equity place, but he'd work for a family office.
Speaker 2:He went for a private equity shop okay, and he'd also work as a consumer fintech that was also actually at rise oh, really yeah that was the reason why we had this connection to rise from before we even started so I should add so rise or rise by barclays is barclays fintech accelerator or incubator program, and that's where we first met. Yes, because Kestrel was admitted onto the program and then Nadir, who was running Barclays Rise at the time, said oh, you should go, definitely go and meet these guys, and I think you and Rohan were like the only other people who were in the office regularly.
Speaker 1:We were the only people that were in the office, and two other guys, but yeah not, they were Barclays employees, right. There was no other startup that was there consistently as much as we were. Yeah, I don't know why.
Speaker 2:It's like a really nice space where people just weren't using it. Um, but yeah, that's how we got introduced, okay, so tell me about that. So you quit your job, you started zeed and you kind of knew already what, what you wanted it to be. What were those first?
Speaker 1:like one, two, three months, like I think we were just like very naive, very unplanned in how we did things right.
Speaker 1:We had our idea.
Speaker 1:We just left extremely high intensity jobs like extreme, like level of hard work and what was expected out of us into something which was, of course, hugely unstructured, not a real plan of action, as we knew all the steps that we needed to take.
Speaker 1:We knew what we wanted to do, um, but we just kind of started. We felt that starting was the main thing and we wanted to give our complete focus to that right. So we never did like, oh, let's go like a few months where we have this thing on the side and when we're trying to figure it out, we were like, okay, we're going to commit to this fully and then figure everything out right. So that's what we did, and we were fortunate in that we had a good network of people from the places that we worked, from our previous community, of people that we we had as a starting point for who to talk to in industry. And then I think it was a month, a couple of months, I think it was in the first month we had like a bunch of people that want to invest in us, and that was the first people who you'd you'd met along your journey from your previous careers not, I mean somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of people we'd never met before, which is completely new people to us that believed in what we were doing and wanted to see raise around quite early on yeah, super early on, yeah, yeah, we were just like we didn't. We thought, yeah, let's go raise some money. Um, we kind of know what we want to do. You kind of have an idea for for this. Let's just go talk to people. We talked to people. One meeting, a couple meetings, yeah, cool, we'll invest. And then that happened.
Speaker 2:We had loads of angel like loads of yeah right, which was we were like how much did you raise in that first round?
Speaker 1:it was small, I was like a couple hundred k okay, it wasn't crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, similar to us in our first, but you know, it's a real testament to it's. It's all about who you know in those early days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all about who you know, but we didn't. You have to understand, we didn't know 80 of these people. Where were they coming from?
Speaker 2:I couldn't even tell you that's what's crazy about it, right like we'd ask we'd meet somebody.
Speaker 1:they said hey, you should speak to this person, okay.
Speaker 2:Or a first. You know some people we would know.
Speaker 1:Recommendations yeah, they'd refer us to X, Y, Z person. They'd come in from all sorts of places. And then our first investor base was this really weird mix of people that we thought were relevant to us Across finance, some media, some fintech AI, ai, yeah, yeah, people that have fintech ai, ai, yeah, yeah, people have really had some founders, like there's a real pool of people here, right.
Speaker 2:But I think because it's it is quite unique, like I haven't come across something like z before, so was the idea in its earliest days the same as it is now, where it's this retail investment app using ai and also video content to simplify, educate mass retail investors?
Speaker 1:yeah, we started definitely on let's personalize financial content for people and let them invest off the back of it. Right, that's where zed really started. We're now doing almost the exact same thing, except with less of a focus on consumers through an app platform and less of a focus on video and more of a focus on ai as the way that we do that personalization.
Speaker 2:So talk to me about that. How are you guys using AI exactly within your app?
Speaker 1:So within our app more generally, because those are like Okay, both, both Okay.
Speaker 1:So I mean, in general, what it is is how can we take as much financial information and data about a specific person and how can we take all of this market information that takes place in the world, and how can we put those two things together to generate personalized content and financial narratives for people? So how can we tell you the right thing at the right time that leads to you building more confidence in your portfolio, trusting your asset manager or wealth manager more, um, and making decisions that are more suited towards you? Okay, holistically, improve your uh financial life.
Speaker 2:Fine, so let's look at those two sides. So you're looking at data that's generated from a person. So what might? What might that be?
Speaker 1:that might be transaction data, consumption data. It might be interests things you like, things you believe in.
Speaker 2:Where do you see that from the social media?
Speaker 1:So we get it from, for example, consumption of content. So, for example, let's say we take our app, we also have usage data on how people are interacting with the content on our platform. That may come in different forms, so it may come from, as you said, it may come from social media. We don't really go into that much detail because people aren't as intentional about that. It may come from other platforms as well, where they have consumption data on content.
Speaker 2:So you're basically learning what kind of a person this person is, how they consume content.
Speaker 1:And first party as well.
Speaker 2:So they could tell us explicitly that I'm interested in this or I like this. Okay, this is what I am. Okay, but the whole idea is that you want to curate content for a person to help them actually action. Is that the six metric of success?
Speaker 1:and it's not just curate, it's also generate from scratch, so it used to be. It used to be a lot more curation focused yeah taking content from some places, finding the best stuff and matching it to users. That's what the app is right.
Speaker 2:If you think about it, you completely, because there are aspects of which are completely AI generated, like those, the financial reports that you guys do yes, yeah, yeah, but now, yeah, those are completely AI generated. Yeah, okay, very cool you might not be comfortable talking about this on the podcast, but let me know I've just had a random memory of when we went out to lunch once and you showed me a podcast that you guys had released. Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that and then you said, yeah, so it's completely ai generated yeah, it's um.
Speaker 1:You know that was. You know. Do you remember when that was?
Speaker 2:because it was about this was I think august it was before, well before we went to Saudi um.
Speaker 2:I think it was closer to like January or February no, it was definitely some yeah, maybe maybe so it was January, february this year, right, but it was this crazy thing because you pulled out this podcast and there were a number of episodes and there were, there was like there were two co-hosts, I think like a man and a woman. They were talking about all kinds of different topics and he said yeah, it's completely so, it's an earnings podcast, so every time, earnings came up for a sub list of companies that we decided on, um, we would have two hosts discuss the.
Speaker 1:What just happened about that company a minute after the the whole, uh, and it's cool the official earnings call finished. What was the name of the podcast again? Uh, it's called exposed earnings exposed earnings yeah so, yeah, and do people know it's AI? Yeah, we say it at the end Okay, this podcast is completely generated by AI. Don't take it as investment advice. It's just for informational and educational purposes.
Speaker 2:Because for me I was completely dumbfounded, Like you couldn't. I'm just going to play a little bit of it. I couldn't tell at all that this was.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now let's talk about the their performance, so this he's not a real guy. Quincy highlighted some interesting points about their global operations, for instance in north america and they've named themselves yeah, and no, no, so he's talking about the ceo of a company? Oh fine, okay, I mean everything the tone, the inclination, the accent yeah, if you're really enjoying all the market insights and investing.
Speaker 2:He even has an ad I'm dropping on this podcast. There's an ad, a fake ad.
Speaker 1:No, it's a real ad about Z. Oh, okay, fine, she's snuck in there at the perfect opportunity for you to check out. You know the way that you cut in and you say I've already noticed that you know like 10% of you subscribe.
Speaker 2:It's about 12%, 12 now. But please do subscribe if you're listening in, but that's crazy. So that's the kind of thing that you guys can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's, that's an example, and so this was interesting for us because we did that in january, february time and then in about june, july time, I think it was yeah google released um notebook lm. Have you used that?
Speaker 1:no notebook lm is a very similar concept to this, but you give it a bunch of information, so you drag and drop any like a pdf or a whole, whole host of things. Um, and because gemini has a 1 million or 2 million context window, it can take in a lot of information in one go and you can say, yeah, give me a podcast of this info wow and within two to three minutes it will generate something very similar to that.
Speaker 1:But about the content that you just gave it, we kind of did that like six months before everybody was good, everybody was going crazy about it, and we're like, oh my gosh, like we were kind of early to that but what was the?
Speaker 2:what was the aim of it? Was it, uh it?
Speaker 1:was fun. A lot of stuff we do. We just think these are cool products, let's just make them. It doesn't take us that long. That was like a week's work a week, a week's worth of work wow nothing crazy, um, and we just release them. See how they do like, see how people do people find them cool. Um, we also did like in that same period that period we were going really crazy with stuff. We just like we were really trying to push the boundaries. We did a broker call as well we did a broker call and a CEO call.
Speaker 1:So the broker call is you call up this number. You actually get a number, so you call this phone number as a contact and he picks up the phone and he starts speaking to you hey, man, what's up? And then you tell him hey, how are my investments doing? Because it knows what number you're calling from. It will tell you hey, your portfolio is up this much, Tesla's up like 10 today, because why? Why is it up? And then it will go and it'll find out.
Speaker 2:So it's an ai broker which you can just call at any point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can say hey, make this trade for me and it will do it. It will do all of these things and it's just a phone call away, right. Well, we thought that was crazy. And then we did like ceo clone, clone their voice and like a call about hey, I missed your earnings call, but can you give me a lowdown of what happened?
Speaker 2:and so it's like you're having this conversation with them two things ai models are notorious for having, I think what's called you know they're not always accurate hallucinations, hallucinations, how on earth do you get around that? So that's where the ai itself sometimes just makes things up, yeah, but it doesn't know. It's making things up, yeah, yeah it. It doesn't even know that it's wrong, so it will tell you something is 100 accurate, but in reality it's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do sanity checks, you can do referencing and sourcing of information and you can have all these parameters, that or processes that you do after you do that first generation to detect there's nothing crazy.
Speaker 2:There's nothing crazy going on here if the guy's telling you hey you need to buy this stock.
Speaker 1:That's something crazy. We don't want it.
Speaker 1:We don't give advice right sure so we prevent, we put all these roadblocks in place to stop that from happening, but equally, we prioritize making sure that we can actually get a product out that is interesting enough for people to use, whilst also figuring out all of this stuff, because if you want to wait and figure out everything before you let people even try it out or get a feel for what you're trying to do, you're going to be stuck in development for it right, and so we take this approach where we try and get a version of what we like into the hands of people as quickly as we can so we can learn and, at the same time, figure out all the other stuff that we need to make it production ready.
Speaker 2:Of course. Of course, the best way of learning is getting it into the actual hands of people. So that's one thing. The other thing is it may be less relevant to you guys but bias, I guess.
Speaker 1:So it's very important to us actually, okay, okay, fine, because if we're, when we talk about personalization, that is all about bias. Right, that's me biasing, um, taking a whole host of information and saying is this, is this person going to believe me?
Speaker 2:but how do you ensure that the model that you're creating is not biased one way or the other, like you may be not very risk averse, for example, and you create a model that in itself is not very risk averse and keeps I know it can't give advice, but may be very optimistic about a number of companies, more optimistic than perhaps it has a right to be how do you account for that or get rid of that?
Speaker 1:we do a lot of steering, right, right? So we make sure that we're in the driver's seat of what's happening, not the AI is on top. So we're controlling the inputs that are going in, we're controlling what comes out and deciding how to process them next. When you structure it in that way, you get over some of the biases that you're describing, but there are other biases that exist. For example, hallucinations are you touched on earlier. But hallucinations are super interesting because they get under the radar a ton.
Speaker 1:Right, because the way the models are trained is based on the feedback that the user gives to the model, right? So if you ask, hey, how do I um cook this dish? And then it gives you all those things and hey, that's great, that is then used as a positive feedback to the um, to the model, to say, okay, I've just said the right thing, right, this is the kind of thing that this person expects. But the problem is that if I say, hey, that's great, I haven't even read the whole thing. It seems right, it seems like it follows the right structure, it has ingredients, it structure, it has ingredients, it has steps, it has all these things. I'm going to give that feedback without even reading it and the reason, and so what the model can then do is it can just sound convincing.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right, it can sound like I know exactly what I'm talking about and if I say this in a more confident way, way, that user's going to tell me he likes it, even if he doesn't even know what I'm talking, if he doesn't know that I'm making this whole thing up right. So there's all these like ways of getting in a way that's like a real person. You know, like a real person or a real broker may not know everything all the time, but exactly. You just need to kind of sound convincing.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yes, it doesn't mimic real life a lot. A lot of brokers do not know what they're talking about. They need to say something to make you feel confident, because back in the day, because you're on the phone, they just want you to say, okay, let's buy that thing. So the model does mimic human behavior, but it's for us to make it better than the human right, equip them with more knowledge. Better than the human.
Speaker 2:Okay, so is that where you want to take z, where it could perhaps replace a broker entirely? Um, where's the future of the app? Because if you look at the app right now, it's done very well. There's two sides of the app right. There's one where you can search different companies, publicly available, publicly listed companies. Yeah, click on it will create this very like nice looking, slick, summarized um earnings reports or financial statement in almost like a tiktok or instagram story type format. You also have the the content, but that's less your created content. That's more like other people's content which has come through, and I guess that's how you learn a lot about a customer by which videos that they're clicking on it.
Speaker 1:I guess you engage with with influencers to create that stuff yeah, yeah, so there was a pool of creators yeah, um and those creators range from people that make content on youtube and tiktok to people that write sub stacks and news about this stuff, to actually financial institutions as well. Um, whether you're an asset manager, we have asset managers on the platform that make content. Um, we have, um public companies as well that make content about their own asset, and so it's sourced from quite a wide pool. So we've made that pretty wide to make sure that there's enough content for people to consume. But the way that we're taking that and the future of what we see with all of these things right bit of technology that we're building and developing is the thing that ingests all this information about a customer and about the markets, puts those two things together and enables content generation, and that can be direct to consumer, ie through our app, but it can also be for other companies who want to do the same thing.
Speaker 2:So is that really where you want to focus on now is going to those companies and give them a platform to publish information and consumable type content.
Speaker 1:Not give them a platform to consume the information. Give them infrastructure to generate content for their customers.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:That's really the direction that we're going in Okay, very cool, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's the future of ZEED.
Speaker 1:That is the future of z.
Speaker 2:That's where we see the most opportunity.
Speaker 1:Because at the moment you see, oh, I don't trust ai for this thing, I don't trust the air here, but if you look at the rate at which stuff is going, the trust barrier becomes, you start to overcome it, right. And so we imagine, okay, what is what is this? Human advisor, you know, personal investor, direct consumer, like what is the the way all of these things come together in the future? And how does that enable more? Um, how does that enable, like, smarter wealth management?
Speaker 1:right and we think it's. It's that combination of personalized, intelligent content that serves the actual customer, because it's all about value provision. Right did, did you?
Speaker 2:learn about that from other major apps tiktok, instagram, youtube algorithms for how they do it, how they personalize content for people for our feed.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's it's, it's similar in front of the sector of. Okay, we think you're this kind of person and we're going to generate we're going to curate content for you based on the content we already have, but none of those platforms generate content right, so it's not similar at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But I mean for the gamification part, because you want to make an app that's as sticky as possible, that people are just coming on to learn and be educated but also be entertained in some way.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, for those elements um the the techniques. We were heavily inspired by social media and if you look at our app, it's filled with features of consumer apps people use every single day.
Speaker 1:Right, it has a tiktok feed it has like instagram, like stories, it has spotify playlists and has actual things for you to just listen to and not do anything else. On right, it's notification structures and the way it does all of these things inspired by consumer social apps, and so what we tried to do with azid um is really take all of those learnings and build a a truly finance oriented consumer social app, but that's a that's incredibly difficult, like a lot of people understand, like kind of FinTech pretty well, but the world of consumer social is this entirely different beast, right, which isn't actually governed by how much money you have as well. It plays on very, very minute elements that enable exponential growth, and we were obsessed with that portion of it more than the fintech angle of you know brokerage go into that more.
Speaker 2:When you say it doesn't care about how much money you have, you mean a large organization throwing money at something. Yeah, yeah, yeah this problem.
Speaker 1:There are people that have spent millions and millions and millions trying to do trying to do consumer, social and finance but there that doesn't necessarily mean that they've succeeded.
Speaker 2:That's that thing, right really, who's done this before?
Speaker 1:I've not come across that it's okay, if you don't want to talk about yeah but the idea is that they're not doing it as well as you yeah, I'm not trying to like put anybody down and saying it's, I'm just trying to say how much of a hard task it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over the past three to four years. I can name at least three or at least five companies that have raised over 10 million dollars or pounds to do a concept of social investing, right, those two words put together. And what social investing really relies on, more than anything else, is the social part right the fact that you can drive growth without paying for users.
Speaker 2:Is a little bit of the magic of it that you can't really tell what's going to go viral. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:The whole part is it's magic. It is magic when it works and it's magic to figure out, and the whole thing is like it's hung by a few kind of shoestrings, like it doesn't really make sense either. That's what makes it so interesting but what?
Speaker 2:you must have bogged it down into some kind of constituent parts, right? What? What makes a good piece of content?
Speaker 1:oh sorry, a good piece of content yeah or a good consumer social, because these are two different parts okay, let's do both right.
Speaker 2:What makes a good consumer social app?
Speaker 1:good consumer social app is something that has insane word of mouth, that has a referral rate of something that is high. That's what it means, like every user and I do what every user require brings on three other users.
Speaker 2:That's a good consumer social app that is incredibly hot so they just can't shut up about it. They need to tell their friends about it.
Speaker 1:They're forced to right, these apps are forced to do all these things, and the reason for the, the reason why that's so difficult, especially now, is because or the reason it's even interesting, right, it's because you, you would know this right app downloads are expensive yeah it's very expensive to get somebody to download your app.
Speaker 1:Um, and it's an art just as much as it is a science right of putting ad spend in the right place getting people to use a product, getting people to refer their friends, incentivizing people to refer their friends. But those social viral loops are the thing that makes or breaks user acquisition and yeah, there's a it's all like I'm not. You know I'm not expert in this, I've just spent a lot of time doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, firsthand, but um but what works, what's worked for you, you know, I think a lot of our listeners might be interested in that part, this is uh, there's no.
Speaker 1:If there was a playbook for this and I could tell you the playbook, I wish I could. The problem is the playbook does not exist. Okay, every company has a different way of they've gone about solving this. Um, and it's very concessional to the time because it's it is very much a game because the the factors change and you need to iterate your plan to do it. Um, and andrew chan, partner asccz, like goes into this, like crazy, and we were obsessed with that, that style of thinking, um, and it's the way that it breaks down the ways like uber grew yes or snapchat grew or um slack grew all of these things right which rely on um network effects, um to drive growth.
Speaker 1:For us, things that we saw that worked best were all the kind of experiments that we did earlier this year where we threw out crazy products in into the wild, um like the podcasts we did, like the investor quiz that we did, um like the ai generally stories, like all of these things that have huge talkability factors to them. That's what we are really good at. We're really good at building these things and shipping them like super quickly.
Speaker 1:What was the investor quiz oh, it was just like uh, you, you go on and you get a phone call yeah and then you talk to this person and he puts the phone down and then it's like a game and you you answer certain questions and it takes you down different paths and at the end it tells you okay, you're the most like this investor, this super famous investor oh okay, you're like it's like a maya briggs test, but but it's like super interactive. It has all these different components that we built into it.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:A bit more than just yes, no, yes.
Speaker 2:And all of these things that you did, what drove the most growth to your platform? The quiz did pretty well for us, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the quiz was pretty cool because we baked in the sharing elements of it. But, yeah, we had so much fun building these things amazing. Yeah, the team, the team's great. Okay, we ship and the way that we work is, uh, it's really just optimizing for what's the? What are the products that we enjoy? Can we see other people using it? And that's all intuition based, right, okay, that's nothing to that's.
Speaker 2:It's very unscientific it's just yeah, but it seems like that excites you a lot. It seems like you're a very data-driven guy, but you're not afraid to just risk it yeah, I'm super data-driven but I make a lot of my decisions off guys and feel so. Tell me about how you guys work as a team, because how many of there are you now? There are six, of us six yeah, gosh okay, and you mentioned your competitors have raised like tens of millions. How much have you guys raised so far?
Speaker 1:um, we've raised about 500k so 500 really not that much. How long have you guys been running?
Speaker 2:for just over two years okay, still pretty early stage, yeah we're super.
Speaker 1:We are very early stage as far as things go. We've been fortunate to have customers as well yeah, so that helps us to operate semi-independently of investors okay, so those are B2B customers.
Speaker 2:yeah, we're talking about so we work with platforms.
Speaker 1:we work with asset managers, financial institutions, to help them generate content, to simplify complex financial concepts to their investor base and engage them and you charge on like a software as a service type basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, okay, very cool, very cool. Sorry, we're getting very into the nitty gritty, but just asking the things that I'm interested in.
Speaker 1:Hopefully the audience is interested in it as well. Everything's interesting to me. That's what we want to know about Good stuff, good stuff.
Speaker 2:There's so much more I could ask you about, but I wanted to move the topic of conversation a little bit more generally into AI and because we are not the Money Talk podcast, we're the Muslim money talk podcast, we're going to talk a little bit more about the Muslim world in general and how it's affecting it. So a little bird told me that your dad is an imam.
Speaker 1:He's not an imam your bird was completely wrong.
Speaker 2:He told you that I'll correct you nicely, oh man, okay, you know who you are, he told me.
Speaker 1:But okay, he runs a. He founded a mosque.
Speaker 2:He founded a mosque. Neither of you are wrong.
Speaker 1:So there you go His dad's like an imam or something. That's really what he said as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, but obviously you grew up in and around your dad, basically built the community, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it was the past 10 years. It's been 10 years since he founded this community and this mosque with an amazing team of people. Everything from you know, like the first Jum'ah Salah, to purchasing the land. Now there's a madrasa with 400 students. Wow, it's a whole host of amazing things that have happened through that and that's all kind of uh, that's his charity work.
Speaker 2:Right, that's alongside all the business stuff that he does.
Speaker 1:And oh, your dad's an entrepreneur, yeah, yeah, so he runs some, he runs a couple of businesses there, so that's a. That's obviously a world that I've grown up in a household. That is, uh, intentionally or unintentionally influenced the way that I think and the way that I view things as well how so?
Speaker 1:naturally, I'm just in. I'm in environments where I see a lot and learn a lot, um, indirectly, without you know, being, uh, as an observer, right, I've seen all of these things happen. I've um everything from business and contract negotiations to getting like planning permission, to how do we run this huge event for all these people? How do we fundraise for this expansion?
Speaker 2:Which is pretty unique, like a lot of people don't grow up in and around that environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've always had that right. I've always just seen all of these things around because yeah, it was super interesting, right? I'm not thinking, I'm not like making notes, I'm not thinking how am I going to use this information?
Speaker 2:I I'm not thinking, I'm not like making notes, I'm not thinking how am I going to use this information?
Speaker 1:I'm just, it's just ingrained embedded in your DNA, basically just in here. And then, every now and again, I'll hear something I'm like well, I have a decision that we're thinking about now and I think back and I think oh wait, I remember that thing that.
Speaker 2:I said one time right maybe it view on things sometimes Kestrel, because of how fed up I was at how poor Islamic financial services were in this country. Often people didn't use them because of how bad the user experience or customer service and indeed how high in price they were. So Kestrel was the answer to that. If you download the Kestrel app today, it can help you by creating a budgeting plan. Plug in whatever bank account you have and it will create an auto budget just for you. You can then tell us what goals you're saving for and we'll save towards them automatically into pots and then, crucially, link you towards Sharia compliant investment savings products as well. So download Kestrel today and try it out for yourself. Now back to the podcast. But from coming from such an entrepreneurial background, do you think Muslims have a problem when it comes to investing or entrepreneurship or risk-taking in general, especially in this country?
Speaker 1:In a disproportionate way, do you mean?
Speaker 2:Yes to the general public. To the general public. There's big, huge levels of financial illiteracy. Yeah, I go around, but we often see at least at kestrel we're seeing a lot of that's very much disproportionately affecting the muslim community as well, where muslims seem even more risk averse or more likely to fall for scams as well okay I don't know if that's what you'll see, do I think that muslim investors are more likely to fall for scams?
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever seen anything to suggest such a thing especially from the UK and it'd be interesting to hear how you've seen differently. I think that there are more variables at play, for example, the types of investments that you have, the kind of like shirier side.
Speaker 1:But I've always found investing to be quite pure as a true investment. If you're investing in a company, it doesn't and as long as the company is not compromising on your, on your beliefs, you're as an investor, you're very similar to any any other investor, right? Um? So what I've seen is they're just generally subject to the same biases that everybody else is. So the uk, as in, I think I can't remember his name, but you had a guest on recently that was talking about property and power oh, zaid Zaid Patel, yeah, yeah, that's right property is everybody like?
Speaker 1:seems to love properties but it's the same across the UK, like because we we speak a lot with investors in different regions so we work with platforms in different regions so we understand their user bases as well. But the UK just loves property. They love it, right. Anybody talking about investments, they don't. Stocks and shares, yeah, that's all great, but property, yeah, they really wake up right. Why do you think that is? It's because people in the UK are not very. They don't like taking risks right.
Speaker 1:They want something safe, something they can touch, something they can feel. You go to the US. Everyone's crazy. They're investing. From when they're 10 years old, they know everything about stocks. You can go to any person on the street and you can ask them about a public company right, a public traded company, or what stocks do you have? And they'll have a view. They'll say, yeah, I love this stock, I love this company.
Speaker 2:Silicon Valley maybe no, no not.
Speaker 1:Silicon Valley. You go to anywhere. I've travelled an enormous the us, fortunately, um whether you go to the middle of texas or you go to new york or you go to chicago, it doesn't matter. Like, you can talk to most people about investments and they'll be comfortable having a conversation here. It's not really the case wow, it's much more of a niche. So if you know about investments, you're much more smart.
Speaker 2:You're much more like smart yeah, we'll have to put that to the test. We could do a muster money talk street interview yeah go out there and just ask people yeah okay, gosh okay. So you think it's a uk problem?
Speaker 1:in general, I don't think it's a. It's a muslim thing okay um, I think it's a cultural thing as well, then same everything I just said holds for entrepreneurship as well.
Speaker 2:And if z does its job properly. You want to put an end to that. You want people to get more and more interested in actually pulling the trigger and get comfortable with investing in the stock market.
Speaker 1:I think we definitely wanted to. That was a huge area of pull for us into something that we thought we could really make a dent in. I think it's incredibly difficult because a lot of the challenges I wouldn't really call them challenges, but a lot of the things that we've seen, especially with the UK population, is that it's not really about their information you could give them the UK population is that it doesn't. It's not really about their information. Like you could give them the perfectly logical, most sound argument and give them everything they need to know about this thing, but they'll still say, oh no, I don't really feel like it Right, Because it's such a it's so new. It's not just new, it's just people make irrational decisions about it.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it's okay that people are making a rash transition about it, but it's more of a cultural thing. It's a cultural thing that people in the UK don't take as much risk. People don't, or people like to say it's Europe more generally. I don't know as much about Europe, I don't know as much about Europe generally, so I won't say that but they're just less willing to take these financial risks. Because there's always, of course, there involved, right, but increasingly we're. But that's an incredibly tough problem to solve and you're up against culture, which which takes, of course, years, decades, to change and and and shape right, um.
Speaker 1:So right now we're, we're much more focused on solving problems, that is, within our, within our power yeah, so yeah what we can, what it is within our power, is to improve the way that firms communicate with their customers or the information that customers get. It's much harder to say. We're just going to change the culture and the mindset of people and suddenly, a year from now, every single person is going to be investing and starting their own business on the side. There are different magnitudes of problem, but they're both equally not equally as hard, but they're different views on things. Right, what we're working on now is more. It affects and it drives people in a cross region, so we're not really focused on the UK.
Speaker 2:Just the UK? Yeah, that's not our focus. Basically, wherever your B2B customers are.
Speaker 1:Wherever investors are, wherever the investors are, wherever investors are very cool.
Speaker 2:So AI, artificial intelligence. I'm going to bring it even more broadly out big data it's said to add. I think the last report I saw was. It claims they're going to add 15.7 trillion to the global economy just through AI and robotics by 2030. It's also going to put 15.7 trillion to the global economy just through ai and robotics by 2030. Um, it's also going to put 50 of the workforce out of work by 2030. Um, do you think that's overblown or realistic?
Speaker 1:it's not overblown at all. I was going to say maybe it's an underestimate really yeah, gosh. So, um, this is a bit of a personal bit, but uh, yeah, I was. I was, strangely, as a kid kid, I'm like 16, 17 I was weirdly obsessed with wealth inequality right um 16 years old. 16 years old, yeah. So I did a, I did a project. I wrote like a whole many, many, many pages I can't remember how many, maybe like 20, 30 pages right about the effects of digital technology on wealth inequality.
Speaker 1:And I read this huge book it's like this big um about it's called Capital in the 21st Century and it breaks it's an entire capital in the 21st century yeah, and it's an entire, it's an enormous book right and I read it like cover to cover um and it talks about how digital technology uh affects income and wealth inequality in the world and a historic view. So it's talking about the last 100 years or plus, um, I think it's a few hundred years actually, um, and it breaks it down and it's fact, it was it, and this is very much before people saw the realization of llms take like mass market yeah I take mass market.
Speaker 1:They were made. This was many talking about manufacturing era and robotics and how that changes over periods of time, and that when I read that and I did our research, that really just drove to me that where you want to be is you just want to be agile in this market, because jobs where there's job losses and then there's job creation on the other side of things, right, um, and a lot of that I saw that, yeah, that kind of makes sense, like some jobs exist that didn't exist, but then, like four or five years post, that I'm seeing this huge change of the market. Right. When I was then, I there's no way I would have predicted that this stuff would all be here, but despite that, those things are all applicable to me, right, because of learning, relearning, education, like all of these things put together, um. So I think that, especially we look at the way that things are going, um, and the types of jobs that people have, it's just like they don't need to be doing these things right why were you so obsessed with wealth inequality at 16?
Speaker 2:was there some sort of incident or something you saw.
Speaker 1:I can't remember. I feel like maybe I picked up a book or I went to a talk, or that's crazy. I went to a talk in at the London School of Economics just randomly okay I don't know. You know they do like public yeah, yeah, I've been.
Speaker 1:I think I just went to one when I was pretty young very cool maybe that was about it, or maybe I read the book first. I I actually can't remember why, why I picked up this book, or I decided to do it. But wow I kind of just found myself there and very kind of coming back um yeah to the whole jobs thing and how this stuff will happen.
Speaker 2:So very interesting because this is what kind of jobs do you think are going to be replaced? Is it more the customer service? The things which are very process driven don't require a lot of thinking, just looking at data and making a decision.
Speaker 1:It's just all the slack in companies, like all the, all the stuff that nobody likes to be doing, wants to be doing um stuff, like all like the knowledge work stuff, like um, companies can just be so much more efficient. Um, a lot of them don't want to be um, but they should all be trying to be right um, and I think it's it's the kind of like technical parts of it, right, you? Just, you just have to try a little bit to get rid of like six, yeah for sure, and um you let some people loosen these. I think there's a, there's a whole, uh, I can't remember which mp or something at the moment, but they've, they've raised like a pot of money to let the civil service try and uh be run more efficiently right and running them more like a startup so it's like there's a bunch of entrepreneurs trying to support it, but that's the kind of thing that is.
Speaker 2:Is can happen if you just give a little bit of that right people yeah, try and optimize some of these things right, because nobody needs to be you think things like that are going to happen in america now where you've got elon musk? I hope so.
Speaker 1:I wanted to happen across the whole world but um the but it's. It's quite worrying for people, right that? Oh no, I'm not gonna have this job. What's gonna happen? Yeah that's on. That's on governments to figure out. That's not. That's not on. You know the private sectors figure out. That's really a.
Speaker 2:It's literally all the comments yeah, a state issue yeah, they need to be thinking about these things and from from a wide-scale religious kind of perspective, do you think ai is going to transform the way in which muslims live or practice their faith? This is a little clippable, clippable content we're trying to get.
Speaker 1:I think that people will be able to connect a lot more with their religion when there's more ai in the world and the reason for that is because you see all these people that are obsessed with their jobs, um, spending, bound by the hours of their job and, uh, the responsibilities that they have. But when you reduce the impacts of that, uh, the burden of that on people's lives, then you have more ability and bandwidth to focus on your faith.
Speaker 2:Do you think so?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do think, so Do you not?
Speaker 2:No, I think to counter that a little bit, it's not the same, but hadiths are now widely available. You can just Google right like a verse from the Quran or a hadith, and I think to an extent that's amazing. That's really good. It gives people much wider access to understanding their faith in ways they would never have been able to before. But I think it also devalues the, the knowledge and the work that goes into that. A little bit centuries ago, people used to travel for months to go learn at the feet of a scholar. Yeah, right to understand. Yeah, but I'm not. I'm not saying so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, notice that in what I said, I never said that no, I know. I know you're saying I never bridged anything to do with information being more widely accessible but.
Speaker 1:I think information is hugely widely accessible for this context, right? So whilst there are, you know, I'm sure you could have an uh, a version of, like an ai scholar or whatever, like. There's loads of things like this to help you answer your questions. What it should be doing is like giving you the right steps to go and speak to the right person to understand these things and explore these things. Right, but the only limiting factor to that is the time that you have to invest into exploring um, your faith and doing all of these things, which comes from having more time, having more time to focus on these things and focus on these elements, um, so that that's. That's where I would see it.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of a boring answer I was hoping having more time to focus on these things and focus on these elements.
Speaker 1:So that's where I would see it. It's a little bit of a boring answer. I was hoping you were going to go into it. What were you hoping for me to say? I thought you were going to talk about there's going to be like… People are going to go. Well, that's religious and stuff.
Speaker 2:There's people who are just going to be like in relation, like doing knickers with an AI.
Speaker 1:Oh no, I don believe in that stuff. I'm like, so I think this is true for a lot of people in technology. Yeah, maybe I'm maybe I'm not right in this, but they are super like. They're very, uh, traditional about their views and ideas and how they want to live as a person because they're exposed to so much innovation in the world. Right, and I kind of see myself as, um, what do you mean? So the ultimate like tech? If you were to enable like a ultimate tech lifestyle? Right, has all these like gadgets and, yeah, and processes in your life. There's like everything's like automated for you, but the way that I ideally want to live is without anything, right, I just want to have, like, I love thinking about how people used to live, like hundreds of years ago yeah without any technology.
Speaker 1:Right, and I love thinking about that's the way that, um, I could live my life, but it's uh, and being like devoid of technology, but right now I'm a complete opposite, right you mean like rearing chickens?
Speaker 2:yeah all of that stuff growing your own thing, yeah same man, I watch so many like homestead videos just like one day I'm just gonna have my own farm and yeah, I'm gonna raise chickens, horses, yeah, cattle, and all this stuff is like it's crazy chicken poo is like really acidic, so it destroys the grass yeah wherever they keep it.
Speaker 1:I haven't got that far you gotta bear that in mind, and then there's this whole thing about.
Speaker 2:Do you want to raise chickens or rabbits?
Speaker 1:I'm not I'm on neither because I just want cattle oh, okay, yeah like cowboy stuff okay, cool.
Speaker 2:Is that the future For when Zeed's massively successful? You sell it, you cash out my ranch. Get your own ranch in Texas. That's it. That's me Amazing. Okay, we're running a little short on time, but I understand there's a bit of an announcement that you want to make regarding Zeed. Oh, my gosh announcement.
Speaker 1:It is an announcement. It is just a way of describing what we do to people, because over the past three to two and a bit years we've done an incredible amount of things, from our consumer platform to the products we've built for institutions, platforms, asset managers, and maybe by the time this podcast is out, maybe a week after. But we're kind of clarifying what we do to people, right, and bringing in, honing in our roots and sharing the amazing work we've been doing for the past six months, super undercover and secretly some amazing design partners. Okay, so a rebrand. It's a rebrand of sorts. We're keeping the name, we love the name.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a rebrand. It's a rebrand of sorts we're keeping the name, we love the name, yeah, but it's basically showing what we've actually been doing, because we've been super under the radar for a few months as we've been building some of these new products.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's really this magic engine that takes data in one end and generates personalized content on the other end, and it's already done that for hundreds of thousands of people Right. Wow, that will test it. So, yeah, we're like very, very excited to be talking about this in literally like a couple weeks time. It's like our big New Year announcement.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:But this is like, I guess, a preview that it's coming and it's a quick announcement, very cool.
Speaker 2:Very cool, I think. Hopefully it should coincide. Your episode is going to be the last episode of the year, so I think this one's due 30th, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it should be perfect. Say 30th of December, maybe probably the next day or something. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2:So why the name Zeed? What does Zeed mean?
Speaker 1:Good question. We had a different name first, okay, and you're like you can't have certain names. Yeah, so we raised some money, we already called this thing, we already called like activist. And then, uh, we needed a new name and we needed it quickly, like within a couple days type thing. So me and my co-founder, we just sat in a room and we're thinking, okay, what, what is it? Uh, let's think of a cool name. Right, has to be short, has to be trendy, has to be something that we can imagine people saying like a lot. And, uh, we just came up with zed.
Speaker 1:We're like, oh, this sounds cool, right, this sounds cool, right it's just a cool sounding sound it's like gen z and video, and it has like okay elements together and we tell people that, oh yeah, that makes sense, yeah yeah so we've, we've, we've like run it, we're like, all right, cool, that's it. We've decided on the name. Yeah, and then I told you that we had a bunch of angel investors right, yeah one of them, after the fact we've changed everything.
Speaker 1:It's like oh, by the way, I love the new name. I was like, oh, yeah, you like it. He's like, yeah, do you know? It means something. I was like, oh, no way, what does it mean? He's like yeah, it's like an old kind of arabic word, right. I was like, oh, didn't even know it was arabic. It's like yeah, it means like the essence of it. I'm not, I don't know the direct. He's like yeah, legit, like that's what it means. I'm like, damn, like I wish we knew that when we were behind the law it was meant to be yeah, it was. It was one of those crazy.
Speaker 2:Wow, that is insane it's, it's similarish with us, right? Because, kestrel, I don't know if you know the the story behind I know it's a bird.
Speaker 1:It's a bird.
Speaker 2:That's as far as I know, but similarly we had a different name and I don't know the name.
Speaker 2:It was like ethepay or something. It's really bad. No, it's really bad. We user tested it sounded like dog food, but it also wasn't available anyway. So then we went with kestrel. I would never recommend going with the name of an animal because it's almost never available, trademark wise or domain wise. Yeah, so we knocked some vowels out of it became k-e-s-t-r-l. Um, and why we came up with that? Partly it was because it was just my favorite bird uh, because I was a bird or something I'm really into animals and like wildlife, but also there was this.
Speaker 2:I've not mentioned this part before. There was this children's series and book series I used to love when I was like four or five years old, called animals of farthing wood and one of the birds, which is about all these animals who are escaping this wood and this far I know it's not.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know the war and peace on on uh, finance, you know financial services and all of that they usually read, but it's about this group of animals. Their forest is getting destroyed and they have to escape the forest to go find the fabled land which is where they're trying to head to. And they have to, you know, navigate, going through developments and cities and motorways. And of these animals, one of them is a kestrel.
Speaker 1:But also kestrel I was hoping for this big, like this huge moment that happens and the kestrel saves everyone it was my favorite.
Speaker 2:It was my favorite uh character in the thing. But also, kestrels eat a lot of things, including starlings. So we were like we're gonna take on starling back. So that's what it was, that's a cornet that's. But then retrospectively, um, someone was like, oh yeah, have you? Do you remember that movie? And also that book, kez or kestrel for a knave, what is that? Sorry, kestrel for a what, kestrel for a knave.
Speaker 2:It was this uh book that a lot of school kids in this country usually have to read and there's also a movie called Kez which is about this working class boy up north who finds a kestrel and trains it and he has this whole bond with this kestrel and it's this whole thing about. It's like this larger narrative around the schooling system in this country.
Speaker 1:It's like an education kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sort of. But the idea where it comes from is that there was like this old book of falconry in this country and I don't know why I'm spending podcast time talking about this but it's all right. Some people might want to know, but there was this old book of falconry um which used to denote what birds go to what social um class of person.
Speaker 2:So like an emperor would have an eagle or a king would use a falcon, uh, or like a peregrine falcon or something like that and a knave, or like the poorest of people would use a kestrel, because a kestrel is a tiny little falcon. Can't catch anything bigger than a sparrow or a mouse or anything like that. But the idea is that the kestrel is kind of like democratizing finance because it can be used by anyone.
Speaker 2:So you know it goes full circle that way, but that doesn't come off very well branding-wise. So what's the story you tell people? We want to take out Starling Bank.
Speaker 1:So that's what we say.
Speaker 2:So you know, they've not said anything to us yet, but who knows if they listen to this. Yeah, there we go. So in just the last few minutes that we have, do you have any advice for budding entrepreneurs, whether they've started their journey or they're thinking about doing it? What's the one piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to do their own startup?
Speaker 1:I would. I would optimize on two things. The first thing is who you're doing it with. I think it's super important you have a good relationship with them, um, but it doesn't just come out of the blue. You need to build it over time and you need to know that person super well, um. And the second part, which is kind of two parts, is you just have to do stuff. People, people kind of like discount this thing. Like you do really just have to do things yeah, right um, you can't.
Speaker 1:You can talk about doing startups for a long time. A lot of people do talk about it for a long time, right, but till you get into the weeds of starting to do something, anything, any project, right, you don't.
Speaker 1:You, you don't know like anything yeah um so you gotta get started in some capacity and then the the kind of follow-on to that is you have to take it seriously, so you need to give it enough time to learn what you want to learn, and I think it's very hard to do that um on the side, and so have a plan for what it takes for you to do it full-time as well. Um, obviously it's different for different people.
Speaker 1:They have commitments, they have jobs, have responsibilities, but map it out like think, okay, I'm like you can start off as a project. But think, okay, at what point am I going to take this seriously, right, and have a path of getting there? Yeah because until you give yourself the non-zero opportunity of something getting huge and getting massive, um, you know like it's not gonna happen, is it right? So you need to be there I'd really agree with that.
Speaker 2:The moment that you go full-time, it changes the entire dynamic and relationship you have with making this work, because it's like it's not just like a nice thing that's there in your life, like a hobby that you tell people about, it's more like my livelihood depends on this, my dream depends on this. So you'll be amazed by the kinds of things you'll do to make something work, and having the right co-founder by your side is incredibly important.
Speaker 1:There's also one you asked me earlier, like how do we raise more? What do we do? Right, the fact that we were committed and we were, we had already said yeah, we're doing this full-time that was a huge plus point. For a lot of people that we're speaking to, it's like oh, yeah, okay, well, you guys are doing it full-time you know like I like you guys, I like the idea. Cool, I'll give you something amazing but without that you're doing it full-time.
Speaker 1:You just don't take people seriously right and it's a, it's just a huge yeah, you're just talking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just a lot of people can talk and it's all right but okay until you're trying.
Speaker 1:People really respect that. People really respect the fact that you're doing stuff a lot of people we've met over the past couple of years. It's I love that you guys they tell us. I love that you guys are doing this thing, because I've thought about this thing for a long time amazing, they could be industry leaders. Yeah, xyz stuff, but just by virtue of you working on it and giving people something to use and to interact with gives you, like, bonus points, right?
Speaker 2:absolutely. What do you think we should be doing differently at kestrel?
Speaker 1:about what like I don't I don't know anything.
Speaker 2:Anything we're under indexing on or.
Speaker 1:I know you guys do a lot of B2B stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's something I resonate closely with. It's something that you end up doing and stuff, I think. And then you have the consumer stuff as well that I know you're super passionate about, right. I don't know what your balance is on those things.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean right, no, I get it yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like a super tricky thing to navigate.
Speaker 2:It is, it's just, we're in very similar positions actually where you have a consumer app, but you're also doing the b2b side, but my heart is definitely in the consumer side as well and trying to make that work, so we're always trying to figure something out. Um, I think by the time this video comes out, we'll be announcing our boycott tracker, which is using open banking to.
Speaker 2:Actually I heard you guys were like different companies yeah, you mentioned it um a month ago yeah, so we started building it about a month ago. First iteration is ready, so it's on my phone now. It will be public in about a week or two times, so hopefully, by the time this video comes out, it'll be out and then we're just going to be iterating, iterating and, yeah, hopefully new things to come yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that, yeah, the quicker you can do it like I'd love. That's why I love consumer stuff yeah it's a cool passion of mine, so anything that you can do that innovates on the consumer level because you have a huge platform to do it right I would love to just see like more of that stuff like this, so we'll make sure you can try it out yeah okay, fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been a great conversation, suman. Thank you so much. As-salamu alaykum, alaykum, as-salam, thank you for listening to the Muslim Money Talk podcast. If you like what you heard, then please subscribe to Muslim Money Talk. Wherever you might have been listening to this, give us a like and share it with someone who you think might be interested. It really really helps us out. Thank you, as-salamu alaykum, and see.