20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave

23:12It was really just a result of one of our board members saying trust me This is a good idea is going to work and he wrote us the the check pretty interesting times What was the check and what was the price? It was 10 million on roughly 40 was the price and we took that all the way to a billion dollar valuation was our next or next round and our series B. And actually, we only raised 60 million of primary capital, prior to going public. I mean, we were just incredibly capital efficient. Always a small team. I kept that sort of profitability mindset always from my last business. We had this sort of good balance between profitability and growth.

23:47Yeah, 60 million to get to public. It's the thing I really can't get my head around as an investor. I try to analyze patterns. My interview many, many great founders and so many of the great founders from your UI past to your clavios, to your service titans of the world. Honestly, how exactly the same experience as you couldn't raise hundreds of meetings. And then there's the flip side bread, it's like the hottest companies continue to be the hot companies and they go on this soaring trajectory that is unstoppable. I was trying to think like which is the the more common path to success. One thing that was critiqued was the movement into crypto.

24:21How do you reflect and think about that in the pathway. We never would get asked about that. I think at the time, crypto, I still believe in the foundation of blockchain, the ability for things like stablecoin to move money. I still think there's inherent value in Bitcoin is doing to show store value within digital currency. At the time though, the moves actually hurled them. We had this big partnership with FTX. That's when our market cap reached its all time high was when we announced that partnership and they wrote us a $100 million convertible check into the company. It was sort of boom time for crypto, it was boom time for NeoBank.

24:55And thankfully we never actually went live with that partnership. But we wouldn't have launched it anyways because of the path to profitability. It was a distraction, which ultimately, we had to sideline a lot of our initiatives to just double down on really AI was what we ended up moving more of our focus to. I mean, deals with FTX now and they've been absolutely fucking night nights. be blunt, demanding cash back really being very difficult. Were they difficult with you in terms of needing cash back post SPF? Well, our situation was a little unique as it was a convertible note. So we owed the money back no matter what.

25:26It wasn't an equity investment that they made into the company. And so we did benefit quite greatly from paying them back early that note was not due until 2026. And I think was last year January, we paid them back $71 million as opposed to the time of repayment would have been probably 109 or 110 million. So pretty creative transaction. And I think that also sent this really strong signal to the market last year because we hadn't yet announced our first profitable quarter. And so when we were going to part ways of 70 million of cash, I think people realized that we were about to start to show some pretty explosive numbers.

25:58In that period, before we move to the tone around which is just incredible, is there anything you did that looking back, you think strategically, I wish we hadn't done that? Honestly, I think I would have rather just doubled down on the core product more closely from the onset of the IPO. I think we just have so much room to run in that core business and the real unlock around how AI could impact our business. We started investing in AI years ago as it weighed for us to impact our underwriting. Now Dave was a pioneer in cashflow based underwriting. The first company in the department with PLAD to access connected account information as a way to use for short term credit underwriting.

26:35If that was the thing that we unlocked, an AI ended up being the perfect solution to analyze cash flow data to underwrite risk for consumer credit and fade to 2025, or we're down to nearly 1 % loss rate underwriting a younger slash subprime consumer for short term credit. It's been pretty amazing. And we also now have 80 % of our customer support inquiries are driven by AI. And so both of those things I would have much rather doubled down on versus going of things like crypto, which were not as core to the product to improve what we're doing for everyday Americans. When we look at the turnaround, 50 million to now 1 .13 billion as of today, I'm forgetting the date, but this is recorded when it's 1 .13 billion.

27:19There's kind of two ways to turn it around, reduce cost, increase revenue. Business can be more simple than people think. When we look at the first reducing cost, what worked that you did strategically that to reduce use costs effectively. You know, there was the cleanup of some contracts. Like we had some legacy agreements with our networks and our processors, which we improved. All of our infrastructure costs, we could improve. We fortunately never had to do any riff. The result of profitability was never because we had to lay people off. We were 300 people of the IPO. Davis 300 people still today.

27:54The investments again in AI is really what led to the model of profitability, reducing our support costs considerably, but it was really the AI innovation with an underwriting that unlocked a ton of leverage in the business. We think about AI on underwriting and customer support. How has it changed the margin structure of customer support for you? We always hear like, oh, AI changes customer support. I'm always like, great, cool. What's the actual impact? Well, one is actually a better NPS score around the experience. If you want to talk to, you know, typically this would be the same for most banks and especially in Neobanks in the country, most sort of call center support is going to be offshore.

28:34That's going to take some time to get to. You can interact via chat, but mostly that support, they're looking at a FAQ list to derive the response. AI is able to quickly ingest all that, get you the answer you're looking for within a matter of seconds. So we actually get better scores for a fraction of the cost because I think it probably costs us two to three dollars per contact if someone wants to talk to an actual agent, at least. And so when you think about the cost reduction of someone interacting with an AI agent, they cost literally nothing. I mean, that alone is going to be pretty impactful.

29:05We don't have an insignificant amount of people that are contacting support each month just to understand what their approval limit is. How do we access this part of the app? It's pretty, well, not pretty. It's very impactful. Have you then removed people from customer support or just not high new supplemented existing. What is that kind of resource allocation? We've always had an escalation team that sits domestically. That team's been the same size, but we've also keep mind scale our customer base 2x since then. So we've kept the same size team. We've have less reliance on the outsourcing because more has gone into the AI support.

29:40So there's been no sort of staff reduction at the core team in the US, but it is less reliance on on these sort of offshore companies. On the underwriting side, I actually met an underwriting AI company the other day, and they were selling to one of the biggest providers in Germany, and they were like, hey, you've got 180 ,000 underwriters that were one of the biggest. Basically, we can get rid of them all in six months, and they looked and they were like, fuck, no way are we rolling this out. That's like recession in Germany because of this whole program, so in a way, when you think about how AI changes underwriting and what that actually means, how do you think about that?

30:13Yeah, I've only been thinking about it in one way is what's the consumer benefit to this and the benefit is more credit approvals and higher credit limits are approved because of AI. When you think of how we do it, Dave, if you want to access credit within minutes of joining our app, that's sort of our key go to market for the company, our ad if you see it ad for Dave, it's get up to five or a box in five minutes or less. We can do that because a customer comes in, we have them linked their existing bank account be applied. And the plug is this access to six months of a customer's past transaction history.

30:50We have 12 million connected accounts roughly on the platform at this point. And so 12 million accounts times six months of account history. And then we get a connection on an ongoing basis. We have access to nearly a billion transactions. When we launched the business, it was just a rules based model. you know, when do you get paid our confidence, your ability to keep a positive balance over a certain amount of time, our loss rates when we started the company were north of 10%. And at that time, we were only offering people $75 of credit, the average being around 50. You've paid to 2024 at the end of the year, reported the average amount we're giving out as a hundred and eighty and our loss rates are 1 .2%.

31:28You think about the power of AI analyzing that cash flow data, it can look for commonalities in what makes up a good credit quality customer or a bad credit quality customer based on where you work, where you shop, even types of ETMs are there clusters of fraud around certain types of areas. You can start to suss out areas of risk that a rules -based engine would never be able to get to that AI can quickly analyze. Because Dave were an overdraft product or an overdraft killer, the duration you're actually borrowing money from us for is very short. So you're going to utilize our product for five to 10 days on average.

32:05We're getting to maturity on the entire loan portfolio. So fast that the AI is constantly able to teach itself what it did good and what it did bad versus, you know, a long -term installment loan company that may use AI, but they're not going to know the efficacy of that model until six to 12 months in. Our model actually learns every couple of weeks. and so the power of that's resulted in more credit per user at lower loss rates. You generally see the opposite to drive better loss rates. You usually have to pull down your credit limits. We've actually seen the divergence of that and it's really really powerful.

32:38I'm fascinated. You said that like it started at 10 Sentinel straights moved down to 1 .8. I think you said that to 1 .2. 1 .2 was industry average out of interest? I think north of 5 % in its huge. I mean, going back to the levers for profitability when you are originated. I think we did 1 .6 billion of originations in in the fourth quarter. Every 10 basis points of loss rate is going to result in significant amount more margin into the business. And so we've been able to improve our gross margins on Dave from at the low point in 22. We were in sort of in the mid 40s. And our gross margins in Q4 were 72%.

33:14Do you think like JP, Goemon, Pigtey, you're biggest providers? is, do you think that able to incorporate AI efficiently and fast in a way that they will need to? It's just very different. I mean, how they would integrate AI, the way that it works for us, our whole business revolves around having a very lean and digital first cost structure. I think about how the incumbents are operating their business. They have a, they have a legacy problem and you've heard the JP Morgan consumer CEO talk about this, Mary Ann, and that it costs them $300 per year just to break even on a basic checking account.

33:53And so if you're not a consumer that is using a Chase Sapphire card or has a mortgage or uses Chase private, private client, the only way they can make money off the younger consumers or the lower income consumers is by charging heavy minimum balance fees and heavy $35 over draft fees. That's the only way to recoup your costs. When I think about a company like Dave, we have no bank branches. My annual cost to serve is nearly 40. And so I can offer a vastly superior product at a fraction of the cost and still generate 72 % gross margins. Our checking account is free. We have no overdraft fees on the checking account.

34:29Our cost to access credit is only five bucks if you want to borrow $100 a day. And so that experience compared to paying $35 for access to buying a cup of coffee on overdraft at a major, major bank is so vassu superior. And then that ultimately drives the low cost drives of low cac because people tell their friends about it and our acquisition is 30 % worth of mouth. So it drives this flywheel that I don't think the big banks would ever be able to catch up to. And I think they will ultimately seed on the lower incoming yogurt consumer. And instead you're seeing the bigger banks doubling down on more of the private wealth higher end client I would say the banking system is actually quite good in this country.

35:09It's really for the 50 % of Americans that are earning less than $100 ,000 a year, paid to to paycheck, over drafting their account a lot. They're the ones that should not be banking with the incumbents, because it's just too expensive. Listen, I'm a VC. I'm paid to semi -s very grandiose statements from little data and project it with a lot of confidence. When I think about that, the kind of common statement is this, and it's simple, banking for poor people is a bad business. is that role. I think people had that stigma early on when the company was burning capital, but we developed a really, this is part of the sort of the term around, so I don't want to sort of jump the gun on the story here, but we developed a very crisp message to the street, which was that I would advise any founder to figure this out for themselves, is you're building a highly scalable technology platform.

35:53At what point, whether it's a user metric, a revenue metric, does your platform actually become profitable? Because what is so great about technology companies, you should have a lot of operating leverage built into your business. It doesn't need infinitely more people to support infinitely more customers, right? And so we have this message to investors and to the company as well that once Dave reached 2 .1 million monthly paying members that the platform would reach profitability. And every member that we added thereafter because we didn't need to add more headcount to serve us the next 2 .1 million monthly paying members.

36:27We would reach significant and profitability. And so when we hit that number in Q4 of 23, we had our first $10 million of e -bots or a profitable quarter. We've since compounded user growth through 2024. We had 2 .5 million monthly paying members in Q4 of 24. And we generated 33 million of profitability and fade to 2025. We've guided for the year to achieve 110 to 120 million of profitability. And so you're really hard to see the the teeth of the operating lovers built into these businesses. And so banking for, I wouldn't call it poor people. I'd say banking for people poorly served by incumbent banks is an amazing opportunity because you can bank them with a highly scalable, highly efficient platform that is inexpensive to operate because of that drives very efficient cash.

37:15And so it's actually an amazing business. And most people missed it except people like Imran that put money in at the, at the moment. People often say to me, Harry, you sure you're not Israeli because you have the directness of Israeli in an English voice. So I'm sorry for the directness there on that one. And there are economies of scale that make the business better. I think about seven powers. It's the best, but that anyone can ever read on business. And it basically states seven powers that create sustaining defantibility in a business. And one of them is economies of scale, essentially the more that is used, the better it gets, so to speak.

37:47And there are economies of scale that's where at 10 million you're able to offer better acts more why because of scale. That I would point again back to the underwriting. So because of the high velocity of this extra cash product where people were borrowing money for a very short period of time with Dave, we've actually issued that product 130 million times at this point. People use it 130 million times. So the more that the system actually sees those positive repayment behavior, you're going ultimately it's hard to see better loss rates and that results again in higher credit limits per user.

38:20And so it drives this flywheel of success. And so there's absolutely an economy of scale. And with all of our service providers and our networks, the more customers that we get on the platform, the cheaper our cost of serve actually gets. And so it enables longer term profitability there too. I have to think as an investor about distribution of gains and outcomes in any given market. And I had Nick from Revolute on the show. And he said that kind of the next generation would see really the consolidation of banking providers, five global banking providers absolutely dominate and be trillion dollar companies.

38:53You'd see the removal of kind of localized banking and these kind of global players would dominate. Do you agree with that statement on the consolidation of banking providers and five or six taking the majority of market share? I don't know about five or six players. I do think though that there's an interesting time for someone to build a global neo bank. Now I think Revan Lovesong a really nice job. I think new banks trying to do something similar where because you have these digital first tech stacks and you have banking as a service built into more and more countries, the plan is now in 14 countries, you can start to build these sort of global banks and then with things like bridge and stripe with sort of this innovation around stablecoin, you can start to get rid of sort of this cross -border currency friction that does exist and you could finally build a global bank.

39:39I don't see a major incumbent like a chaser, a BFA doing that, but I could see a digital bank taken on on and being quite successful. The thing I didn't understand is US shits on Europe really and everything. That's beyond this in terms of size, size of company, size of market cap, size of people. And my question to you is not in banking. Again, revenue is $60 billion now. I don't know what the chime is quite, but it's what 15 to 20. What helped me understand genuine? I never got this. Why is the US smaller when it comes to neo banks, the Europe? It's, yeah, so sorry to cut you off, but I mean, it really is the different markets that we're serving.

40:17And so I think I said earlier in the call, the banking market for people making over $100 ,000 a year. If you keep enough money in your checking account, if you have a pretty good credit score, banking's not so bad. You have access to pretty good products, pretty inexpensive products. You have access to a mobile application to manage your money. You can get access to a financial manager like it's not bad. It's the poorly served customer that's not making $100 ,000 a year that is not able to maintain that minimum balance. That's the market to disrupt in the US. It is a massive one. I can't say what chime is worth at this point, but Revolut's going after a different market.

40:53You look at some of the countries are super successful in. They're going for markets where like the main banks Don't even have a mobile app yet. Like they're actually becoming the first kind of digital first mobile application for a broad swath of consumers there. If you go talk to new bank, they're not actually banking the lower income consumer in the country like banking is actually screwed up for everybody if you were to talk to David new banks he goes and it tell you that his customer base in Brazil and Mexico is actually a middle to higher income consumer. It's just a very different opportunity that Austin Chime are disrupting in the market where there is just this Systemic legacy issue of how the banks were not built to serve the the lower income population well here in the US and that's still a massive opportunity And could one of us be a safety doing our company like certainly but that's interesting because that's kind of contrarian in the way that most people think legacy banking providers Globally, but in the US as well, actually don't provide that good a service It takes a long time for them to respond the customer service is not great quality of like and Siri products isn't great when you look at a lot of what Ravalu does from stock trading to crypto trading to insurance to eSIMS to travel insurance.

41:59These are like financial super apps versus a chase or a bank of America. You're saying that actually, no, they're pretty good. They're actually pretty good. And I think about the go -to markets that Ravalu is solving for sort of the cross -border currency friction, like that's not really a thing in the in the US. Like the need to open up an account very quickly on a mobile app. We have that here in the US. It doesn't exist in a lot of the countries that plays like revenue is disrupting. And you've seen a lot of the European companies try and be successful here in the US. They have consistently tried to come here and retreated because their product offering is just not a fit for the US, at least in the way they go to market in these other countries, just to show you how different the two companies are.

42:40I mean, Revolute is going for the banking license in the US as we speak and going full on to get the US. Do you think they'll be able to? It depends how they're going to try and attack the market. But we have not seen this sort of super -atmintality be successful. Here, the way has been successful in other countries where there's just a lot less competition, I would say. If you were advising Nick, say I'm Nick, and I said, Jason, I'm not going to put it on his accent because he'll kill me and I sound like a Bond villain. But you're advising me, I'm entering the US market in three to six months.

43:12What should I know and do having your advice, having seen what you've seen? I would just look at all the different types of customer segments and pick the one that is the most poorly served by the existing competition. I think companies like Dave have done a great job in Chime to build a significant penetration in the market. There were 12 million customers. Chime, I think, is a similar type of penetration. Cash apps and a good job, they've got 50 million people using their product. Like he would have to think about this population, something that he needs to build on a track to product for, because I think it's gonna be an up -hobe battle, unless he wants to spend 500 bucks on customer acquisition, then maybe you could go after the incumbents.

43:50I specialize in asking basic questions. You mentioned there having the same customer bases as in terms of volume or number, as like a chime. Why a chime more valuable then? We just take in a very different approach to building our businesses. Our focus for Dave has been building I sort of a credit first, near event. You can download our app. We specialize in AI underwriting to get you approved for credit within five minutes of joining. Chime is taking a very different approach, being very methodical about wanting to be your primary bank. They want to make sure that if you have any value in their product that you need to be a direct deposit member of their app.

44:25And we just find that to be a very expensive value proposition to sell to consumers. Because in my view, people don't wake up in the morning excited to open up a new checking account. It's very cumbersome to go switch all your bills over, figure out who you need to pay. It's a new strange bank relationship. Whereas with Dave, we get to know you and try to get you to switch over time. I'm going to give you a proof for a couple hundred bucks when you join. We give you the Dave debit card to try us out. We're going to give you some benefits to help you earn some extra money if you take a few surveys here and there.

44:56And then we're going to ask you to direct deposit over time. But my hack is $16 because I take this speed of value approach where I want to make a happy customer immediately. Try and take a very different approach where it's a no -fear account. They're very conscious. This is a bank account you're opening and that they want you to be a long -term user or this may not be for you. It's so funny that you're more common or similar to revenue than you think because that's exactly the revenue approach that we had. You know, obviously, Nick on and he says, no, I want it to be like a snack. I want you to use it for your holiday and go, my lightness and then your sack and holiday.

45:29My lightness even more and it's good. And to your point, it's a lower knack when the entry point is that, and over time, you have more and more snacks, and it becomes the meal. And you actually then move as a result of that. And it's kind of an entry wedge into the real win. That's our approach. I think if you want to raise a couple billion dollars and spend a couple of billion dollars on marketing, you can do this direct deposit. I think Chimes in a good job, they've raised the most capital. They put the most capital to work. Again, we got to IPO with 60 million of primary capital because we've taken that snackable approach to build this relationship, but I also think from a long term competitive advantage between also the neo banks, the data set we're building around this AI underwriting is going to be such a mega up when we start to get into additional forms of credit.

46:12I think we're so early on where our monetization is a business given we just offer basic checking and an overjob product got extra cash. But if we wanted to get into any other forms of lending, we have such an advantage by using this AI cashflow data. What form of lending do you not do today that you would like to do that would be most transformative. We see a lot of overlap with things like buy and L pay later. We know our customers aspire for that. Our extra cash product because it's so short duration. People tend to use that for gas, groceries, rent. But if you wanted to buy a airplane ticket, our books for school or a t -shirt, like these discretionary items, people are not using Dave for that, at least from a credit perspective.

46:51And we like to think that we can be there for you in every potential point in your credit journey as a customer. What's your boldest bet on the future of the Neo banking ecosystem in the US when you look forward to the next three to five years What do you think is very clear that many other people don't see the big thing people miss was the the inherent operating leverage built into these FinTech platforms like they're so scalable especially with AI and so as these neo banks are to Compound user growth beyond what it costs to pay back the cost to build their platform There's just these are great businesses.

47:24So I think people really missed that. It's that's one and then two the ability for the Neobanks to get deeper into credit and use their expertise there to disrupt the legacy cost there because there's still such expensive credit for consumers out there. Compounding interest credit cards are terrible for consumers. They're incredibly expensive. They're not great products. If you use them to buy things from long duration and you're just paying off a minimum of balance, the fees you're paying are massive and it's like $3 trillion of credit card debt sitting out there that people are just revolving and paying too much money for.

47:55So I'd love to think that Nea Banks can leverage their low -cack and their cheap operational structure to start to eat into the fee structure as if the bigger banks are also getting fat on. Final one before we do a quick part is Trump, bad off, a business owners, than a Biden administration. Yes. Why? Well, just his approach to less regulation in general. Again, this is less of an overhang for companies just to focus on building true innovative products without the need to constantly feel like they're going to trip some government wire. And I don't know that the government really understands this customer base and you see the things that they try and push forward like 10 % cap on credit card APR like do you realize what that would do to credit card approval rates like the reason why people charge They do for risks because there's risk and the second you take away someone's ability to monetize just means they shrink the funnel So it's like great job you cap rates you just kicked a bunch of people out of the credit card ecosystem and now they've gone to like go take out paid it loans or something.

48:55It's just not a, it's such a headline win for a regulator that doesn't actually take a mind, the end consumer. The same thing goes for around trying to cap overjaphies. When I said about the JP Morgan CEO around the cost of serve statement, that was directly related to if you get rid of overjaphies, we're just going to jack up the cost to maintain a monthly account with us because we need to recoup our cost to serve somehow. And so it's another one of those like regulator wins where great, you know, headline no more over Jeffies But guess what the banks have now increased cost for a monthly account fee and now no one gets approved for overdraft Which is a life wine for everyday people to go get gals and groceries It's suck to get stuck at the gas station just because a governor regulator wanted to get a headline win What I needed this money I screw you.

49:41I saw the 10th and a Piano's like I don't know if they actually understand how this world works you're going to get like loan sharks who are really dodgy having thriving businesses because of your regulation. Trump's going to help get rid of that. We just need to get rid of the grandstanding and really try to think about what is going to be the best thing for the end consumer. And that's where I go back to there's enough competition in this space where you can't screw the consumer because they have they have enough options. I want to move into a quick fight Jason. So I say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts.

50:12Does that sound okay? Yeah. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve. The one thing that we, that I probably regret as a founder and sort of this business was with venture capital dollars, the big push to hire season pedigree, C -suite executives. Not as easy as it sounds, very difficult. I would really question every founder who's trying to over hire too fast in the C -suite, be very careful if you bring into your close circle. That's so interesting. So would you not hire the matured and you grow internally or just wait for later? There's scaling issues by having some of your junior team try and get into more senior positions over time.

50:48I would just be careful how you meet these people. Get to know them over time. Don't make rust decisions and just be sure that they truly align with your culture and your vision because they can be very disruptive to your culture but they also can be very disruptive when they leave because people don't like seeing sea suites leave. So it's a very important decision. I don't think pedigree should be your necessary filter because one company success does not mean it's going to be successful for you. Which competitive do you most respect? What do you take from them? I would say a lot of respect for what Revolutes doing.

51:21I think they're, I don't almost call like regulatory as a service. Their ability just go into these different countries and set of operations. It's pretty remarkable. I mean, if I could snap my fingers and repeat that capability, I think our products are needed in more than just the US, but the superpower they have to go in all these countries and do that quickly, I think is pretty impressive. You can buy and hold one stock for 10 years. What stock do you buy other than Dave? I haven't looked at the most recent stats on just overall retail penetration, but I think Amazon is still pretty small when it comes to owning the overall retail market.

51:54I still think that's a pretty good stock to own for 10 years. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months. I'd say more 24 months, but you know, the shift of profitability was probably the only thing I thought about for a solid two years. And how have you changed your mind? Sorry. It's just a philosophy shift in doing that when you're going from a growth at all cost mentality, which everyone's pushing you for to go to a profitability at all costs. Like it's such a major mind shift. It's such a shift for the entire company. That was probably the hardest thing and the most most thoughtful thing we've had to do the last couple of years.

52:24Which can seem a brand you respect the most. Apple. Aside from maybe their delay on AI, they just build the most polished consumer product and they have a great well -respected brand. I think it's everyone I think aspires to reach the level of polish that Apple has been able to do up. Was the biggest short in the public markets? I don't feel a couple asking. Answering that one is a public company CEO. I do not like short sellers, and so I don't want to give them any ammo. Do you not think any functioning efficient market has to have a short I think the ways in which they derive their profits are not always above board.

52:58And so maybe it helps drive an efficient market if there's the capability of shorting. But I think if you had a long only stock market, it wouldn't look terribly different. How do they derive profits badly? Well, you'll see some companies, they'll get these short reports that people put out where an analyst is out there, you know, similar to a sell side analyst. they're actually writing research on a company to get people to short it. And oftentimes those facts are incorrect. Their assumptions, they can be blown out of proportion for things that again are just for purely for profit. That's it.

53:32Is that legal? Is not my misinformation to change economic activity? I believe is legal. I mean, I think if, as long as you're not saying a blatant lie about the business that could be deemed sort of defamation, which is hard to prove, you see big companies. I think most interesting was the one of Hindenburg being shut down. They've written short reports on places like Square, Cash App, and they decided to exit the business. I thought it was kind of interesting. We just had Covon as CEO on the show. I actually skirted that one. I was like, I'll leave that for another day. I wanted to build the friendship.

54:02It's not the most friendly start, is it? What did you think of Hindenburg? Yeah, it's not coming very quick. Final one. Where is Dave in 10 years' time? You said you've got 12 million today? We've got 12 million today. I'm not committing to some sort of a user target, but Dave is going to be much more prominent in your credit life than it is today. I think I alluded to this, but I really feel strongly that our company is very early on in its monetization journey today, given we have a three -year -old checking account business, we have a ten -year -old extra cash short -term credit business, and our ability to continue to grow those two parts of the business plus add in new capabilities on credit to add to those those opportunities that make it a massive, massive thing for the company.

54:43So Dave in 10 years has multiple credit products. We are more of the primary bang for the vast majority of our consumers, and it's just going to be a much bigger business because of the operating levers we talked about today. Jason, I so appreciate you putting up with the direct questions. You've been fantastic. I'm such a fan of the incredible journey. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much. Great to meet you. I mean, what an incredible discussion. The story of Davis, the biggest turn around in the public markets, I think of the last 24 months at least. I want to thank Jason for being so open in that discussion.

55:18If you want to watch the show, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20 VEC. But before we leave you today, turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion dollar start -up requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all -in -one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50 ,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Now at 20VC, we've used Coda to bring structure to our content planning and episode prep, and it's made a huge difference.

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