Google, Shopify..."Stay Away From The Badge Hunters": The Hiring Rule That Built Public.com

0:00Startups don't succeed because nothing ever breaks. That's not how you succeed as a startup founder. In fact, everything will break all the time. And so your response to how things break, that's kind of what sets you apart. And culture is really the thing that kicks in when everything breaks.

0:19What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. and what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:56Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Truth Works. I am Jessica Neal, your host, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Clark. Hi, Pete. How's it going?

1:07Peter Clarke:Hey, going well? Yeah. Are you excited about who we have today? I am super excited. Yeah. Do you want to introduce them? Love these guys. You want to introduce them since you introduced me to them? Well, I could do that. Yeah. Well, yeah. Then super excited to say we're here with Leif and Yannick from the, well, they're the founders of Excel Company Public. Well, I mean, we just say Excel, we just wrote them a check and they do all the hard work. So, but really exciting investment platform, AI native. We'll talk, we'll get into that. And I just love the way these guys think about building the company, how they think about culture and excited to let them share the story and learn more from them.

1:45Yeah, me too. So welcome to the show, Life and Yannick. How are you? Thank you. So Pete is the reason why I know you two. And Pete introduced me to, I don't know, how many years ago? No, I don't know. That's a good question. Four years ago? Yeah, good question. Four? Four, five? I mean, four? What was it? 2020? Four, maybe. 2020? Yeah, I think four. Yeah. In a few months, probably. Yeah.

2:14Peter Clarke:That sounds about right. Well, I'll leave it. I like the story because the request was actually related to this podcast as well in the sense that, Leif, I think you had specifically said, hey, is it possible to get connected to Patty? And, you know, I want to talk about the Netflix culture deck. You know, I'd love to learn more about that. And I think at that point I said, well, probably yes, but then the person you should probably really talk to who was a part of building that but then also had to live with it for quite a lot of time afterwards was Jessica. So you should probably talk to her and get the real scoop on the implementation of what that was.

2:50Peter Clarke:And I think I'd always love the fact, Jessica, that you would point out that the title of that deck was the Netflix culture deck, not the Company X culture deck. Insert your own company name. Use what you want to kind of take the best of it and fit it into your organization. so yeah i think that was the premise behind the intro and then all of a sudden jessica's on the board so yeah when when when janek and i started we actually sent patty's book back and forth to us that was like in the very very early days and so on and i think genuinely speaking we just have you know we're still europeans right and whatnot and so we have like maybe but like sometimes more direct than maybe some americans to be quite frank even though i'm also american now by the but um congrats but but we we always very much appreciated this focus on performance culture in that and the way it was just laid out obviously in the Netflix culture deck but then also like in Patty's book and whatnot and that's exactly why you know what Pete and I was kind of talking about this stuff and so it's like we we always say it's very cool serendipitous that like when we started and you know we're nothing and whatnot we were like talking about this book et cetera then excel came in then you know always do repeat et cetera and then suddenly like you know being on the board is like a it's kind of like an awesome it's a very full circle well it's kind of like an awesome full circle it's well it's it's been awesome to be on your board and i'm so excited about what we're doing as a company and an organization i think you two are really exceptional at navigating a lot of stuff together, which we're going to talk about because you guys have navigated some really tough things along the road, but you've done it with grace and thoughtfulness, and you two just are a really good team, and I want to unpack why that is.

4:52But before we get into all of that, I want to introduce the listeners to what Public is. We just had a big, big, huge launch that's gone very well. I want you to tell them about that. But tell them about Public and tell them about what we're doing these days. Yeah, so Public is what we call the agentic brokerage. And so it is the easiest, safest way to put AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. And so that means that you can instruct agents to basically help you with all facets of your investing accounts from monitoring markets to moving money around and even to executing trades, a class, a broad range of asset classes that we support, equities, fractional treasuries, fractional corporate bonds, crypto options, and more to come.

5:44Over the years, we've added more account types as well. So started with a brokerage account, then we had retirement accounts. Now we added crypto retirement accounts very recently, which has been really fun. And are currently also launching entity accounts, I think, by corporate accounts, even trust accounts, if you have money in trusts. And so we thought a lot about the sort of macro opportunity of the great wealth transfer over the years and what it really takes to capture that. And when we looked at sort of consumer fintech 1.0, call it, we saw that it was heavily shaped by finance going mobile.

6:21Therefore, everything became like a game, gamified trading,$100 payday advances. And that led itself very well to sort of down market TAM expansion. But in America, it's a very case-shaped economy. And so actually 85 % of the wealth transfer will go to the top 25 % of the digital generation, if you will. And nobody was really, we thought, building that product. And so that's basically with a few sort of turns along the road, because to your point, Jessica, there has been some moments. We'll get into those. But I always say we're a six and a half year old company that I've seen every market cycle twice already, given the fact that we launched in late 2019.

7:02Yeah. but but the way you can think about the story is we've built uh we first did a fractional share trading by the way built sort of a fully fractional multi-asset trading system multi-account type and then uh starting in 20 early 2023 added this uh agentic ai layer across everything to help you with with research um and now even even trade execution yeah and it is so cool like i don't know it's just it's what we feel i'm just proud i'm a proud board member i'm proud of you guys look i think everyone on the team one on the team feels that um you know you're only similar to the saying that you're only as good as your last album whatever isn't that like a thing rappers say or something yeah but it's like every product every big sort of product that we've worked on every year has been so much more fun than the last two and so much more mind-blowing right and i think this really has been a build where we're all like i mean arguably there's nothing bigger you can execute on as a technology company than a fundamental technology shift right right and so and so in our space the way it's broken down in the past is like you used to call your broker back in the 80s and trade on the phone not actually on on an app but like on the horn, right?

8:22And then with the internet, you had sort of the dawn of the discount broker, right? Trading moved online. Then with the smartphone, you had this like Neo broker concept, the mobile broker. And now in the era of AI, it's sort of the agentic brokerage model that we think will play a huge part of the future. And we are, to some degree, I also think proud to be the first to push the industry into that direction. And so, yeah, it's been very fun to work on. A lot of joy, a lot of pride in the team right now. And I think everybody's firing on all cylinders. Yeah. And what I don't know, what I love about it is just it's frictionless kind of because you can train it and set it up the way that you want.

9:00Like, you know, like when you give the example of like hedging and all the things, it's like you don't have to make that phone call and go through all the rigmarole of calling the broker and you can just say, you know, help me understand this. And the data and the insights that you get are just so good. What do you use it? What are you excited to use it for? So one thing that I use it for a lot myself is this thing called generating income with selling options, specifically selling covered calls. Okay. And it's one of these things where like, okay, if you own Amazon, Netflix, whatever, you sell instead of buy covered, you sell covered calls, it's called, so that you basically almost like market make it from the other side.

9:44And you can make a lot of money on that in like income. Like I make$10 ,000,$20 ,000 a month doing that in a pretty low risk way. But man, that's always been the most daunting thing. Because if you're doing it manually, you got to analyze risk. You got to read the options chain. You got to understand this thing called the Greeks. I don't know if any of you speak Greek, but the Greeks for people that are not doing this every day can also be sort of hard to navigate. So with agents that just gets reduced to a prompt of everyday scan my portfolio for opportunities to risk opportunities to generate another 5k of income selling cover calls that go a month out, six months out, whatever the case is.

10:30And you put that on autopilot. You literally just like go back and forth a conversation. I mean, three, four, five, six messages. You activate it and then it just runs in your account. And you can either have it run automatically and place the trades automatically. Or if you're not fully there yet, you just set it up as like a monitoring agent that sends you a message like, hey, now you can sell these low risk covered calls on Amazon. Do you want to do that? You click a button and then it does it that way. And so I think we really are very excited about taking this entire generation that sort of learned to trade on the phone, let's say with various degrees of risk, maybe not always defaulting to the most risk reward optimized kind of trades because you get excited about, you know, GameStop in 2021 or some coins here and there.

11:16But I think we do actually really believe if you zoom out, we've collectively as an industry spent the last 10 years democratizing access. but you don't have the same set of resources, right? So you have the same access now. You can trade at the same cost as Goldman Sachs now, right? Zero, like the cost actually doesn't go much below zero. And then I keep reminding people that we offer rebates on options trading now. So if there are any options traders out there in the audience, go check that out. But basically it's all a bit about access. These next 10 years with AI are going to be about resources and really resourcing retail investors, individual investors to the same extent that that institutionals are and i say the next 10 years but the truth is we're pretty much there already there's maybe some stuff around the corners but like give it another year or two and i think think i think we'll be fully there what's interesting in yannick's cover call example is it's a good example of something where a lot of people have heard of the high level concept of generating income to cover calls but they really lack

12:19Peter Clarke:the knowledge and ability to execute on that and where suddenly ai and the automating of these agents can really help people to actually bridge that gap and put these into place without having to go now and read a book and so on and so what what agents really do then they they move everyone up in their own sophistication and that i think is something that's really really powerful which is also then suddenly something that starts to really eat away on the business of financial by this and so on because people will be more able to do these things themselves and they will have more confidence in their own actions as an investor as well.

12:53It's exciting. So people go look at Public and get the app and sign up because it really is quite tremendous. Especially option traders. Go check it out. Okay.

13:07Peter Clarke:Reiterate that. Jessica only says that because she knows the margins on options trading. That's why. I do. I do. It's a good product. Yes, what are you going to say, Pete? Just the democratization of access, right? I think, you know, folks that dabble in investing, you know, you hear about all of these things, but the barriers, right, to actually go and attempt that are, you know, seem significantly high based on the traditional platforms. But just being able to then sort of somewhat confidently say, oh, yeah, you know, I can do options trading, right? Or I can, you know, take advantage of the money I know that's being made.

13:45Peter Clarke:But just when you think about what technology has brought to trading, it's just so cool that sort of public unlocks that for the average person and enables them to participate. I also think what we've seen already is it changes how people think about concepts like trading strategies. Just the word sounds like very sophisticated, like high frequency, whatever. And it's like, sure, but in the same way that you can now build a website, being a complete non-technical person, you can now set up a trading strategy being a complete non-quantitative trader type hedge fund, whatever person. And so really trading strategies can be as simple as every time NVIDIA dips 3 % in a week, add to my position.

14:28Or every time it touches down to a 25 forward PE ratio, add another 10 grand. And so I think it helps, but people have these unstructured strategies actually in their minds. They don't give themselves often enough credit of how they're actually able to kind of have some good ideas. But to life's point, it's the execution on that. Because if you're not glued in front of the screen 24-7, how are you going to just put in the order at the point in time where the 25 PE becomes a thing or it drops or the volatility does this? And so if you can just hand it off to agents, it changes the whole trading experience from like, buy 200 shares of Apple here and there to just, you're just instructing agents.

15:10You're just expressing intent. Evaluations compress another 15 % from here at another 20 % to my portfolio across the board. It changes just how you do all that stuff. And that's why we really think it is a user interface shift by definition. Yeah, because if you miss it, you miss it. Exactly. And you don't know it's coming back. That's the thing. That opportunity is gone. Exactly. Which is especially something that's like, as market hours expand, right? Crypto is already 24-7. the stock market is like you know most cases like 24 5 we're gonna be there soon as well you know that's going to be 24 7 at some point as well and so like it's going to be really this thing where the market is always on and you know so yeah yeah yeah it's actually that's actually interesting about because somebody was telling me the other day uh last year moved into like a new office um and somebody was telling me having this perspective on i was like well it's just uh what's sucks about your office like people only use it a third of the time and i'm like no no no no like we're we're in the office like pretty much all days it's like yeah but you're still going home to sleep you just don't do that right and so and he was we were talking about like people and how many people you need to build a company and productivity and such but the same is true for investing in your portfolio right you basically like once a crypto is over 24 seven to life's points stocks will be there soon and then it's a question of like are you going to be glued to the screen even if you're a day trader even if it's your full-time job are you going to be glued to screen 24 7 no you're not yeah you gotta sleep eventually you gotta get your ariana half a ton uh six seven eight hours how much you need and so yeah yeah well let's let's shift from the the launch and how great the product is and talk about the culture and how you guys have thought about that and what, you know, I think early on you both decided that it was part of the strategy, which hints, you know, why I met you and eventually got on the board.

17:16But what were your thoughts, you know, when you were sort of coming into this of the type of company you wanted to create? I mean, first, the way the company was started, that it was basically the first, what was it like 30 people or something was essentially a mix of people that Yannick used to work with for many years and his old company yeah and people that I used to work with for many years in my old company right so we both both sold companies before and then we kind of brought our own teams back together and so it was a very tight knit group from the start and a very kind of high trust group from the start in that you're obviously able to to you know just like work already like quite fast and you kind of know what you're like like what everyone kind of believes and so on so like the like the the company so to say is already kind of founded quite homogenous from like a cultural perspective you know because everyone kind of came together with like you know very similar same backgrounds yeah from two different teams but like you know yeah i would say similarities you had the same values yeah exactly yeah and so and so like as we as we then started like very the very one of the very first things we did was actually write down principles and so write down just like so what are the high level things that that's you know we kind of want this organization to to work and um and we always looked at that as something where it's like number one they're aspirational if everyone that we would hire in the future would already work like that we wouldn't need to write them down and so these are the things that are just like remind us but And then number two, structuring them in a way where they are much more tools for people they can use in their day-to-day versus like motivational posters that hang in the office.

19:03Because I think whenever you talk company principles, it's very easy for people to just roll their eyes at it. And when we do these onboarding sessions, when we run people through the principles, we literally say that out loud to people. We're like, we understand there's people in this room right now that likely will roll their eyes sick with you right now when you go through these things. But think about them as tools you use in your day-to-day. And a good example of that is principle one is honesty equals bullshit. And that comes a little bit from because the team that started, big European influence, maybe a little bit more candor there than you sometimes have in America, to be frank.

19:33And we realized that a lot of people, for example, especially when they're new, they really struggle actually with candor. And we look at, for example, honesty is also something that is a tool for efficiency. Because you know exactly where people stand. The communication is very straight and direct. There's no interpretation needed. And so on. And so it is a pure efficiency tool. But it's also a tool to build relationships really quickly, for example. right like i will trust you more when i learn very quickly that you're always honest to me and i don't have to read that i don't have to interpret what you might think or what you really think or so on you know and but we knew that was like a very uncomfortable thing and so therefore principle one honestly because bullshit became like one of these principles where it's like a tool and then in the company we have people that within meetings and stuff or when they give other people feedback they say out loud hey principle one in order to set themselves up as like i'm lifting this card up right now like this license that the company gave me to act a certain way i'm not trying to be a dick right now i'm trying to work the way the company wants us to work you know and i'm going to raise this card which also puts you into a position where you're now maybe a little bit more open to receive this like candor you know because it's like a little flag at you before you bring that up, you know?

20:53And that has been, for example, like a tool now that people use across the org. But also it helps because they use it towards us as well. So people will send us a Slack message and be like, hey, principle one, do, do, do, do, do. And so it makes them also feel more comfortable to give us Canada feedback, you know, et cetera. And so like, those are the things that we talked about, that we kind of thought about, like what we had was like type that group that already worked a certain way. And then we try to, you know, kind of, kind of, you know, figure out like how we bring that into words, but then bring it into tools so we can onboard people into the way all these people already are working.

21:25Well, and I think it's important what you're saying. And I think a lot of people misunderstand what culture really is. And of course, it's value-based, right? And that's where you guys started. But it's your operating model, right? It's how people make decisions. It's how you get alignment. It's how you give feedback. It's how you know who to hire and who to fire. It's how you know how fast to move and how not fast to move, right? It's all the things. And I think when you can get very clear on what your values are, but then build the system, the product of working, which is what you guys have done with these tools, that's operational excellence flows through the company.

22:13No, totally. I think that's obviously exactly how we're thinking about it. Like culture is the operating model, the operating system, and then principles are the operating tools, which means you should be able to use them in a decision. Right. Yeah, to life's point, it might feel a bit awkward at first when people join that people are in Slack like P1, P3, P4, colon, literally, but like that's how it works. And I think once people get used to it, they're like, this is very efficient. This is also a way that people don't take things personal as much. Yeah, because it's not about them. It's about the principle.

22:55Exactly. And the other thing I'll add to it is there are these 10 principles. We've open-sourced them, so anyone can go and take a look at them. They're on our website. But they also work in tandem, right? So principle two, principle one is honestly kills bullshit. Principle two is feedback comes from a place of care. And so those two, for example, work very much in tandem because it's a little bit the balance of like, okay, we also have a very clear definition of feedback, by the way. Feedback doesn't equal criticism. Feedback is constructive suggestions for improvement. And so I think being very clear on all those things makes it work and having them help balance each other out.

23:35and I think that's taken us a couple by the way they are versioned too so they're not on GitHub but they could be like we see no reason why you need to write these things once and then not have sort of a version log history because nobody gets anything right in this life for the first time and so there's been multiple versions and although they don't change as much as they used to at this very moment we are still open to the idea of kind of changing them as time passes Well, because it does change. And, you know, the company you are now is not the company you were a year ago. And it's not going to be the company we are a year from now.

24:12And, you know, how you're operating at all of those stages changes. And so, you know, you have to be evolutionary on the culture versus, I think a lot of people are like, let's maintain, let's preserve. And it's like, well, no, we're not making jam. right it's like we don't want to preserve it you know since 1957 right yeah we want to make it make it better and better and better and better but it is because like the principles are just they come top down from straight up company targets yeah right so like it's easy to look at this stuff it's like these fluffy concepts and so on but super straightforward these are capitalistic tools for us to be a more performant company that grows faster and generates more revenues like that is really what they're for at the end of the day and therefore it's like as the company evolves and our goals as a company change you know then these updates to the principles is essentially one of the ways of how we you know try to help align the organization towards those outcomes and so one big thing for us is for example is that you know product velocity is the leading indicator for growth for us whenever we launch new features and new products like that you know flows through you know all numbers that we have every cohort looks better than the last and stuff and that comes from us having a very high product velocity but now you know therefore it's very tight to growth for us to have a high product velocity therefore what are the principles that fit into high product velocity and for example we have one principle which is literally they move fast to organized speeding.

25:53And so just the concept of organized speeding, where it's like, you know, while you create work, make sure the documentation is being created in tandem. You shouldn't sit down and have to write documentation for a week now because you've done something, you know, etc. And so this concept like organized speeding, it directly kind of fits into the sense of how are we able to run quickly as an org, you know, because we're doing organized speeding and this is how you execute an organized speeding and that kind of, you know, principle around that. And again, it's a tool using a day-to-day. You can tell someone else like, hey, this is not really organized speeding what you're doing, da-da-da.

26:25Right. But it comes from the top down of just, we're running a business here and there's targets we want to hit. And these are basically ways for us to then... Right, this is how we're going to do it. Yeah. The author says like... Wait, Pete wants a question. Let him...

26:41Peter Clarke:No, I just want to pause and reinforce, you know, while most people might take away, Yannick, that you make$20 ,000 a month trading options. But back to what has been described here that I couldn't reinforce more is just what we are listening to is a great definition of first principle systems thinking around organizational design and construction, right? Which is, I mean, people ask about it and very few people do it, but just back to what you said, life at the beginning, write it down. People do roll their eyes, right? Which is unfortunate because it's like, if it's not documented if it's not sort of top down well articulated right everyone has questions around where we're going as an organization and then tying all of these things back again to what she just did like these things all translate down to how do we execute as a business and you know there's so many founders often that ask the question like well how do we you know think about the organization and it's like like this like do these things right like you know but they but they don't do them no no when yeah this just popped up was like there's this quote from the day you know sorry so the last thing i'll leave is like this you know now let me drag out old dr deming quote of like every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets right it's like you know it's coming back up again but yeah but it's true but like to the but to the rolling eyes thing and you don't always see people rolling eyes right but it happens all the time there's always someone who will be cynical about things and i think cynicism is generally a very dangerous thing but where the pure fact of addressing it directly and saying it out loud basically disarms it and it's the same way like when you you know like when you talk to someone like in the team or whatever and you kind of feel that they're upset but they're not saying it or whatever and you saying out loud like you seem upset you know and like and and but like i think there's something very powerful and it kind of fits into the principle of all it's bullshit of like being an org that just culturally is very vocal and you know and and doesn't let things stand in the room but says these things out loud and tries to as things are being discovered even if they might turn out to be wrong to be vocal about it because it helps us arm these things and it helps people to also sometimes get the self-awareness to recognize of like, oh, maybe I was a little bit too cynical.

29:13You know, and so on. Because I think this is very important. I think the eye-rolling really stems from people being in other companies and they're going through their values and they're like, oh, here we go, you know. Integrity. Yeah. Then, you know, right. Transparency. You know, and then, you know, they don't see any of that in action. Right. And so, you know, I think that the other thing that you two have done quite well that I think is harder for other organizations is you live it. So, you know, yes, you're going through the principles with people and you're explaining them to them and maybe they're doing the eye rolling and maybe they're walking away with less eye rolling from that presentation.

30:06But then after that, they see it in action. Right. And that's what everybody is waiting for, whether they've been there for a long time or whether they're new. They're looking around, waiting for you to do the opposite of what you said you were going to do. They're waiting to see the hypocrisy. And they're like, I told you, you said, you said we were feedback, but we are not feedback. You don't give any feedback ever, right? Oh, you said we hired high performers, but you have that bozo who's a total jerk over there, you know? So, you know, that's what they're waiting for. And then that also builds the cynicism, right?

30:45Because they're just waiting for that. So you guys actually do a very good job of not just being clear on what it is, but then actually living what it is. I think you're right, Peter. It's really too bad that culture has this brand almost where many people kind of roll their eyes, right? And I think it stems from the fact that it has meant so many different things over the years. Back in 2021, a lot of people thought that it meant foosball tables or ping pong tables in the lobby kind of thing. But I think for startups, it is especially so important, right? Because startups don't succeed because nothing ever breaks.

31:28Like that's not how you succeed as a startup founder. In fact, everything will break all the time. And so your response to how things break, that's kind of what sets you apart. And culture is really the thing that kicks in when everything breaks. And that ended up having massive ramification. Like I'll give another anecdote. we've given this a couple times in the past, but principle 10 is find a win. And two or three months before the whole GameStop scenario, one of our key engineers comes to us and be like, we got to refactor the core trading system. It can't scale much more than this. Like maybe we can grow another 30 % in users, but that's going to be it.

32:04You know, life and I was like, okay, okay, okay, we'll look at it kind of next year for reference. GameStop was in January, right? So it was like, let's get through the end of the year and Christmas and then we'll take a look. And then at the end of January, you know, this GameStop situation happens. all hell breaks loose and we sign up just a ton of customers, double the user base in a week and all that jazz. And in that moment, those guys found a way. And it was just principle 10 to the fullest of how to scale the trading system. And we were one of the few, if not the only one to never really go down.

32:37And that actually ended up compounding into our brand to this day. We are known for our uptime. We are known for reliability. And so I just think it's such an awesome way that you can look over a five-year arc of a principle then going full-on into action, really driving a small group of people to achieve something that I fundamentally don't think that they would have thought about it this way. They might have defaulted to sort of another decision if it wasn't just, okay, principle 10, find a way. Okay, we just got to find a way, meaning I don't care what it costs right now to scale these systems.