Fireside Chat w Joshua Browder

0:00If you had to live in another time period, what time period would it be? The one event I would want to witness was Mansa Musa, the richest person in history. He would show up to a town and he'd give every person in the town a bar of gold. You would think that the people of these cities would benefit hugely from the gold injections, but the prices of bread would just go up 100x. Causing inflation in a town. Massive hyperinflation. You need a structure to allocate resources efficiently. You can't just give everyone all the money. Tonight, I am having the pleasure of sitting down with Joshua Browder, and he is the founder and CEO of Do Not Pay and then Browder Capital.

0:38I noticed in another interview that you did that you said that you're anti-authority, and I would love to hear about the first moment where you were being anti-authority. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your show and also very anti-authority. So I love software, and I think the reason I like it is because you can build things without asking for other people's permission. As a child, typically I was looking at all these career paths and it seemed like you have to like work for 30 years somewhere and then you work your way up and then eventually you can build something. But with software, you have the power to create something and if it's useful, anyone in the world can use it.

1:18And I really experienced this firsthand as a child. So I got into the whole drug of software development by creating iPhone apps and specifically iPhone app themes. So this was back in the day where it was groundbreaking to change the app icons on your iPhone. The iPhone was basically useless. I had all the iPhones from the very beginning. I guess I was lucky to do that as a child. And the very first iPhone, it didn't even have Safari. And then finally Safari came, but then it didn't have any apps and then it had apps, but the apps were very limited. And so there was a whole community of people who are jailbreaking iPhones to kind of expand the functionality.

2:00And that was my gateway drug. I was selling themes and apps on the Cydia App Store, which was kind of the counter app store to the official Apple App Store. And I was selling all different types of themes, like Disney themes and all of this stuff. And I thought people had the right to change their iPhone app icons. So my first kind of thing was fighting Apple and selling these themes. Then I decided that the market on the legitimate app store was like 100 times bigger than the gelbroken app store. So maybe I should create some real iPhone apps that Apple would actually approve. And that was also anti-authority because one of the first apps I created was for the sandwich chain called Pret-a-Manger.

2:46Pret-a-Manger is one of the biggest sandwich chains in the UK. it's kind of like they have a lot of branches I guess or outlets in New York and Chicago but it's not not so big in on the west coast um but I guess the the biggest comparable is just like Joe and the Juice of the UK but more on the food side and I decided to create a Pret-a-Manger app and this was back in the day when um having an app that would tell you where your nearest sandwich store was and was this contracted or did you just do this no no I just did it rogue wow and um Um, uh, it would show you the menu and show you the nearest store and all of this stuff.

3:23And this was truly groundbreaking stuff in the early kind of 2010s. Um, and so I put it on the app store and it became, it was very popular because people really wanted to find the nearest sandwich shop and get the menu and things like that. And it started rising in the charts and it got the attention of Apple, um, developer relations. And they sent me an email saying, we want to feature your app on the what's hot section of the app store on the front page for everyone to see. And they sent me the consent form saying, I have, this is the official Pret-a-Manger app. And I had all the consent and designs all completely legalized.

4:00I just signed it, DocuSigned. And I also kind of was a teenager, so I don't even know if it was even legal for me to be signing these forms, let alone what I was representing. Anyway. How did you get around that? um i i don't know i just signed up for an account and they kind of let me on um and um signed all the forms and then i got onto the whatsapp section of the app store and um i should mention that i was charging 99 cents for the sandwich app and so press amange that the sandwich chain it became so popular that they were getting complaints like people were doing this was back in the days with youtube reviews and stuff people were doing like youtube videos why is the my sandwich chain charging for the app i want to find my my sandwich store um for free that's being so greedy and so i got the attention of this this big company and they started sending me all these letters and stuff and um they they um actually kind of invited me to kind of talk to the legal team uh so i could educate me on on kind of copyright law and i showed up and i don't think they realized that this was like a 14 or 15 year old.

5:09And so I showed up and they kind of realized that I was harmless. And then they completely changed because they realized it wouldn't look good if they kind of sued a 14 year old app developer who was just passionate about their sandwiches. And so they actually invited me in for a private tour of the kitchen with the CEO of the sandwich chain. And they said, we'd love to make this the official app. And so it transitioned from the unofficial to the official Pret-a-Manger app. I kind of gave it to them. And then obviously mobile apps became a lot more important in the economy and they updated it.

5:44And so I was lucky to create the first official Pret app that I guess today is kind of the journey now, millions of people use it and it still exists to this day. So I think as a young person, you can do a lot where as an older person, you have to be more careful. I know that your dad is Bill Browder, and he had a meaningful hand in basically having a bunch of Putin and Russia's assets kind of frozen. And I noticed in another interview that you did where you said there have always been kind of like scammers chasing you and potentially Russians chasing you. What was that like growing up? So my dad is a human rights activist.

6:29And at one point, I would say he was Putin's number one foreign enemy. and thankfully I think now maybe he's been downgraded given that the war with Ukraine and so there's Zelensky and others who are higher on the priority list. Someone else to focus on. Someone else to focus on and maybe now he's been downgraded to top 20 and it's really scary and the reason he's that, his number one enemy or he was is because he's responsible for freezing a lot of Putin's money worldwide. he kind of single-handedly pushed through a law in the United States called the Magnitsky Act which is responsible for freezing billions and billions of Russian assets and is actually the framework for the sanctions on Russia today because of the Ukraine war and that's a very scary place to be when your father is freezing the Russian mafia's money and I grew up experiencing experiencing the journey of him fighting these really scary people.

7:27And it was really kind of sad and scary. There were many times when they would actually show up to our house, the Russians, to try and scare us. And they were using both legal and illegal means to try and scare my family. On the legal side, they would issue arrest warrants around the world for my dad, and And he would be detained in Spain because the global countries assume that when a big country like Russia issues an arrest warrant, it's kind of semi-legitimate. And so even civilized countries like Spain would temporarily detain him until they figured out what was going on. And if it wasn't for the many advocates he had, he would be in a Russian prison.

8:08And then on the illegal side, they would call him, they would visit, and it was really scary. having that experience, you try and look for the lessons and try and look for the positives in that. And I think the biggest positive for me was it taught me to put everything in perspective. It really puts everything in perspective to have such a kind of dangerous group after you and your family. And it taught me to be fearless. And perhaps, you know, if you have minor kind of problems in life, you get a parking ticket or something or you get really upset, you realize that the most important thing is health and being safe and standing up for what you believe in.

8:56And it really taught me to the power of kind of being fearless. Do you think that you would have come to Stanford and like kind of gone across, you know, gone across the world if you hadn't had that experience as a child? I think the Stanford reason was a bit different. And I know it might sound kind of shallow, but the initial reason was in London, it's just pouring with rain all the time. Bad weather. Bad weather. And I was taught myself to code using Stanford YouTube videos. And this was before the days of ChatGPT and certainly before the days of Codecademy. And so the only way to learn was to copy what the YouTubers were doing.

9:35and with Stanford, they would zoom in on the beautiful California landscape of Palm Drive before they started the class. Kind of incepting you with the idea. Yeah, and that's really what inspired me. I was like, wow, if this is what the YouTube videos are like, one could only imagine what it's like in person. And now that I've come, I can justify in hindsight the reasons for being here. I think people are 10 times more ambitious, maybe even 100 times more ambitious than the UK. The scale of capital and innovation here is nothing like anywhere in the world, especially the UK. But initially, it's because of those YouTube videos.

10:11I know that you've spent a great deal of time with people that are very, very early on in their founding journeys. What are the traits and attributes that you're looking for when you're meeting with someone? So I got into the whole investing world by accident. um i um three and a half years into stanford i i took a program called the teal fellowship um to build my company do not pay i'd already was very passionate about it as a project and it had a lot of users like getting out parking tickets and stuff but i wanted to make it a serious business and so i took the teal fellowship and i also there's an amazing tradition where the existing teal fellows every year kind of help out with future years and they help advise um who's real and who's not almost as an interview process.

10:57And I interviewed this amazing person as a prospective Teal Fellow. His name is Adam Guild. And he struck me as true top 0.1%. And so I decided to invest in him in the pre-precede. The problem was I didn't have any money at the time to invest. My company wasn't paying dividends and this was before the scout fund mania that you see today. But I did have one source of money, which is that when you get the Teal Fellowship, you get 100k in prize money paid in installments. And my latest installment just hit. And I just thought I'm just going to empty my bank account and put it in this guy. And that investment did very well.

11:32It's now a unicorn company. And it's better to be lucky than smart with one's first kind of investment. And so I thought I should keep it going. And I've since raised a lot of funds to do it with Browder Capital. And so to answer your question, it's a combination of things. it's really about someone who has an irrational chip on their shoulder that they will succeed no matter what. And really, it's about personal connection to the problem. So I'm Mr. Do Not Pay. I'm the type of person to wait on hold for four hours to save$20. And truly - Have you done that? Yeah. No, no. All the time. It's about the justice for me.

12:13And we also have a lot of wealthy people who use our product it's the same for them um but i realized that not everyone else is as crazy as me so i built do not pay to kind of automate that and the very first use case was because i got a lot of parking tickets and so i looked for founders with similar connection to those issues um jake adler i was lucky to be his first investor and he's incredibly passionate um he even like um i think this is public information so i wouldn't mind me saying this but he even like tests the product on himself sometimes. And that's crazy. Stabbing himself in the leg.

12:47Yeah. And I do encourage people to do that. But if they come to me with that level of passion, it's very difficult to say no to someone's life's work. And I've been in the Bay Area for 10 years now, and I haven't seen a case where someone hasn't achieved some level of success if they're earnest and it's truly their life's work. Now, it could be their second company. It could be something adjacent that they do, but they do generally succeed. And you don't want to bet against them. In the first meeting that you had with Adam Guild, you said that he's in the 0.001 % of the people that you've met.

13:27What struck you as so special about him? So I look for evidence across everyone I back of something exceptional in their childhood. There's a founder called Soren, who I'm not an investor in. He's an amazing founder of Nero. He's a young founder. He just got the teal fellowship and he is one of the best drone racers in the world with adam guild he was selling minecraft service and making serious money doing that in high school some founders do sneaker bots i'm an investor in a company called wap which is now close to a billion dollar valuation company and they were making a lot of money with sneaker bots sometimes it's roblox and sometimes founders skip all of that and even as a 13 year old they go straight to enterprise SaaS.

14:09There's like founders now going viral on X who have like serious revenue with SaaS products. In fact, just before this interview, I spoke with an 18 year old who's multi-million dollar revenue. And I think the kids are all right. I'm 28. I'm getting old. I'm like a dinosaur in Silicon Valley now. But when I was 18, if you even knew how to create an iPhone app, I like to think you're in the top 5 % of entrepreneurs. And now you have 18 year olds doing millions in revenue. Do you think that that's going to continue accelerating and like younger and younger people are going to be having more and more meaningful like results?

14:46I think so. And I think the reason for that is that the transparency of information isn't at all time high. First, you had people like YC, they'd publish everything about starting a company. And we were just talking about Marc Andreessen's essays and Paul Graham's essays that that didn't exist decades ago. And now you can even ask AI every problem. I noticed a trend with young entrepreneurs. It's a bit unfortunate, actually. They kind of let AI kind of decide their lives. Do their thinking for them. Yeah. And I actually push back against that. I don't ask ChatGPT for major decisions because I think it's like an AI psychosis.

15:25You kind of revert to the mean. And that's not a good thing to do. I also think it's unfortunate. Um, I was lucky. Um, I really enjoyed my childhood. I was doing this like city of themes and apps on the side, but you can't be too business oriented. There is a joy of youth. And so I hope it doesn't go too far. Do you have, you know, you want like maybe 15, 16 year olds doing stuff, maybe not like 12 year olds. Yeah. I think, I think 17, 18 is a good place to start, But it's good to know. I have an amazing brother and he reads a lot on X. And I think it's good to start reading a lot. But you still want to have a childhood.

16:05Do you think that you have more fun being a coach or an actual player in the game? Definitely. I love still running my company and I think it makes me a better investor. The half life of being a founder is six months. I've heard investors say it's two years. I think that's a self-serving comment because they conveniently are like one year out. But I deal with challenges every day that the world changes so quickly. The world even six months ago is completely different from where it is today in terms of AI. And then five years ago, it's completely different with the pandemic and all sorts of things changing.

16:46And so I was helping an entrepreneur the other day, like not get extorted by Apple. Apple take 30 % and this is something I constantly deal with. And there's ways you can do it to make classify your app in certain ways. And that constantly changes. And that's something you would only know if you're an entrepreneur. I'll give you one more example. DoNotPay, and I guess this speaks to our company name, has got the AWS 100K credit like five times. AWS and Microsoft and all these companies and Azure and I guess the AI models now, and they give credits to startups. And we realized we could just keep applying for the credit.

17:28And so that's things I advise people to do. Obviously now we're a big customer of theirs, so I guess they hooked us in and they got us. But there's all these things you would only know if you're operating day to day. Do you have any interesting stories of seeking justice for other people? So many. I'll give you two if that's okay. um so the first is is my favorite do not pay product so do not pay started with parking tickets and i realized this issue is bigger than tickets of consumer rights fighting these big companies and governments um so now we have over a hundred different products that help people um and one one area that's my favorite people ask me what's my favorite is helping people sue and get money back from robocall companies um there's this amazing law in the u.s that allows you to get$1 ,500 every time you get a spam call.

18:20It's called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But like most rights that people have, they don't have the time and the resources and the knowledge to get their money and get... It's like the accounting thing where it's like 130 ,000 pages of accounting texts. Like no one's reading that. Yeah. This is like Barry, this law is from 1991.

18:40and the problem with these robocallers is they use fake names fake numbers and i'm sure we've all received a call it's like they're trying to sell us a cruise and you ask them who they are and they kind of and and the caller id is blocked and all of this stuff um so we decided to build something to help help these people uh if you get the spam call and get the money you're deserved and the way it works is it's a trap. We built a special credit card, a virtual credit card and it's not linked to the consumer, it's linked to do not pay. And when they try and sell you the cruise or whatever they're trying to sell you, you can say, I'm very interested.

19:19Here's my special card and you give them the special do not pay card and through the payment network, it gets the business name, address, phone number, all the details through the payment network that you would need to generate a letter to get your money. And there's this one man, I keep talking about him. He's based in New Jersey and he's made it his full-time job using Do Not Pay to get money back from these robocallers. He's kind of an exceptional case. He's made, I would say close to$100 ,000 doing this. He bought a new roof for his house. I guess the weather in New Jersey is not very good.

19:55So you constantly need a new roof. And that's really helpful because I think without the card and without the knowledge, he wouldn't be able to do this. So that's the first story. If it's okay, I'd love to share one more. And this one is a kind of product that I decided to do. And it's kind of a guy inspired me to do it. And that was Warren Buffett. I was a sophomore at Stanford, fresh off the boat, kind of still from the United Kingdom. And I was in a computer science class. And I received an email one day and it said, do you want to interview Warren Buffett on stage and have lunch with him at the Microsoft annual AGM summit?

20:41And I had no interview experience. I'd never spoken to Microsoft or anyone that worked there in my life. So I thought this has to be a scam. And there was a number at the bottom of the email. And by the way, I was no stranger to like strange Russian scam emails and stuff. Yeah. So I was very wary, but I called the number and a nice lady with like a Seattle accent picked up. And I thought, maybe this isn't a scam. And she said, no, it's real. We can send you a flight. We'll actually book you a business class to Seattle. And I was like, wow. I was like, do not pay lifestyle free flight to Seattle.

21:17And so I flew to Seattle and I prepared to interview Warren Buffett on stage. and um i got to this kind of conference center and it was like this ultra exclusive it wasn't like a public conference it was for the biggest shareholders of microsoft and friends of bill gates who was also in the audience so jeff bezos was there um did you meet any of these people yes sam altman was there i walked in and there was like black suvs and security and the first thing i saw is very crystal memory this was like 2017 i guess um was sam altman talking to satya Nadella and in hindsight it's obvious what they were talking about but um at the time I was like wow um all these people but I was I wasn't even focusing on the people that I was kind of very shy I was focused on doing a good job for my interview with Warren on stage and the kind of issue that I had was my biggest thing beyond anti-authority is I always want to be provide a unique perspective to the world and I'm sure you deal with this like how can you answer ask people unique questions.

22:23And the problem with Warren Buffett is he'd be interviewed thousands of times. There's like books written on him, all this stuff. All the annual shareholder meetings with, you know, hundreds of people asking questions. Yeah. And they have this tradition where this kind of college person interviews him on stage. And I looked at previous kind of versions of this. It wasn't there. It's not public, but I asked the organizers to send me previous ones. And it was like all these questions like what should you be investing in or tell me how you got started and I was like I can't ask that this is a once in a lifetime thing and so I got to the stage and I still didn't really know what to talk about but one thing you can always count on with me is shameless self-promotion so I thought I'm the only way I can be unique is kind of insert myself into the dialogue and so I got on stage and I said what is and I said thank you so much for being here um what is one area in your life that you fought back for yourself when you stood up for your consumer rights and i introduced do not pay um i use it as excuse to get the audience do not pay kind of knowledge um i was very lucky because he gave me an answer that he'd never spoken about ever before um in any interview um which is the first lawsuit he was ever involved in um this was before the days of berkshire hathaway being shaken down by these class action lawyers or anything like that.

23:46And it was when he was my age at the time, or maybe slightly older in his twenties. And, um, he was, um, subscribed to a magazine called Harper's magazine, which, which still exists to this day. Um, and back in those days, this was even pre credit cards. Um, so the way it would work is you'd subscribe and there was like a trust system. I guess it was a higher trust society back then. And they'd send you an invoice, um, for the magazine. And And if you didn't pay the invoice, it was a high trust society, but also a more scary society where bad things would really happen. Like maybe they call the police or something like that.

24:20And so you really had to pay the invoice. So you get these invoices every month and read the magazine. And one day he decided to cancel his subscription. And so he wrote to them and he called them and they acknowledged the cancellation. But they kept sending him the invoices and he kept getting the magazines. And he wrote to them again and they kept sending the magazines. And he was so frustrated and so scared that he kept paying the invoices. But he thought this is really unfair. And just to eventually just figure out a way to cancel this damn subscription, he sued Harper's Magazine himself, representing himself in small claims court.

25:00And he took them to court. And not only did he get his money back for the invoices he was being forced to pay, um he also got punitive damages um and i guess it wasn't in today's nominal dollars that wasn't that much but um at the time like a few hundred i i think even less like maybe like 50 bucks or something but in today's today's money it would be a lot and it taught taught him and then it taught me two lessons the first is um it taught him the value of standing up for yourself sometimes only the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And finally, it's citing his rights. He got his subscription, he got his money.

25:41And it taught me a valuable lesson, which is God knows how much later, like 50 years plus later, 70 years plus, people still can't cancel their damn subscriptions. And so that was the inspiration for a product called the free trial card. I guess I love these virtual credit cards. And it's a virtual credit card that consumers could use, especially during COVID. And you can sign up for any free trial and it's not linked to their credit card or credit. So when the subscription comes time to cancel or renew, they don't have to worry about being charged. And we were really the first pioneer, the first ever company to do this.

26:16Now, I guess Robinhood Gold has just introduced it. I'm not too worried about that because our consumers aren't using Robinhood Gold. They don't have any assets. But we were really the pioneer. And it was all down to this kind of story about how it's hard. Robinhood users can be your users once they have no assets either. that that that's a good point yeah i've seen some of these screenshots so after they're no longer robin hood gold because they both have robin hood and reddit there's a high correlation there we will happily serve them a do not pay for much and we don't have to take all your money with risky options we can just a very cheap subscription yeah was there any like outside of actually doing the interview did any serendipity kind of happen coming from that and meeting with him yes actually is that no one's ever asked me that.

27:05It's such a good question that two things, two big things happened. The first is that Reid Hoffman was in the audience and Greylock. I was a EIR intern at Greylock. EIR stands for entrepreneur in residence. And typically they have these very experienced executives who are thinking about starting companies. But I guess Reid was so happy with the interview that he offered me a position to intern at Greylock to build Do Not Pay. And Greylock was one of my first pre-seed investors. And I got to work out the offices and kind of eat snacks at 4 a.m. on Sand Hill Road and really learn from some of the best kind of minds at Greylock, including Josh Ellman, who's an amazing investor and entrepreneur who actually joined Robinhood as a head of product.

27:54And then the second thing that happened was it became known that I did this. I think I tweeted about it and the tweet got some minimal engagement, maybe a few hundred likes. And the Teal Fellowship actually noticed. So they encouraged me to apply. So that's how the Teal Fellowship found out about me. And so I'm a big believer in momentum in the companies I invest in. I think momentum is everything. And I try and say yes to everything. Um, I'm so lucky to be on this podcast, but when you reach out, I'm like, yes, instantly. And, um, when I, uh, events and meeting people and because you never know, uh, what, what will happen.