The Bank Built for the Frontier

0:10Alex Du: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Wharton Fintech podcast. I'm your host, Bobby Ma. And in today's episode, we are excited to welcome Alex Du, Chief Operating Officer of Column. Column is the only nationally chartered bank built to enable developers and builders to create new financial products and services. It powers some of the fastest-growing fintechs like Ramp, Brex, Mercury, and DUT and processes more than$4.5 trillion in annual transaction volume, while boasting the highest uptime of any bank. Column is also the number one issuer of real-time payments in the U.S. and additionally processes over$100 billion of international payments annually.

0:55Alex Du: Alex started his career in investment banking and private equity. Driven by a desire to be on the field and be the one creating value, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford's graduate school business before dropping out to join Plaid co-founder William Hawkey and started Column, or Threat, to have Alex join today to speak about his journey from finance to becoming COO of Column, the championship DNA culture behind one of the most efficient teams in banking, Colum's differentiation as a tech forward bank that comes from its scale, tech stack, and edge case discovery, how AI impacts financial services in the company versus what is just noise, and Colum's support of fintechs at the frontier who are pushing stablecoin orchestration, multi-currency, and cross-border payments.

1:38Alex Du: We hope you enjoy this episode. Hey Alex, good afternoon. I really appreciate you taking the time today to chat. Yeah, thanks for having me, Bobby. This should be a good time. Awesome. To begin, for listeners who have not come across Column before, how do you describe what you do at a high level in the company's products?

1:58Bobby Ma: Yeah, so Column is a technology company and a national bank in one business. And what we do is we enable other companies to offer financial services products. So companies will build on our banking infrastructure platform to process payments, issue cards, hold deposits, lend money, maybe what you see from your fintech company. Usually there's a banking and technology company behind that. So oftentimes at this point, it will be Column. So you may be working with Column already today, and you just don't realize it through the various fintech apps and platforms that you use. The other thing I'll say is we're built for the frontier as a bank.

2:35Bobby Ma: And you can see this in who we serve. So from the largest fintechs that came up over the last decade who are at the frontier, who continue to push the envelope to today, stablecoin orchestration, agentic payments. We are the underlying banking infrastructure, and we've been shipping product and technology at that frontier to continue supporting these companies who are pushing the boundaries.

2:55Alex Du: Thanks for the overview. And you yourself took a really interesting path. So could you walk us through what led you to Column? What were you doing before? And what were you're optimizing for at each step?

3:06Bobby Ma: So I had a very traditional background similar to you, Bobby. And I don't know if this part is similar, but when I was graduating from college, I didn't really know what to do. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So what I optimized for at the time was, let me go build a hard skill set that can be broadly applicable. And finance seemed like a great place to go do it. And so I went into investment banking, and then that was a very natural pipeline into private equity as the next role. So I took the next role without being overly thoughtful about it, but it was just on that continue to build a hard skill set that could be applied later in my career.

3:40Bobby Ma: And then at one point when I was in private equity, and I'm sure you've seen this as well, is just sitting in one of those management meetings where, you know, the management team is there, the advisor, you know, the consultants are there, the investment bankers are there, everyone's, the accountants are there, everyone you can imagine that all the different jobs that people think about, everyone was in the same room. And I'm sitting there as a, you know, a junior associate in private equity, just watching everything unfold. And that was the first moment where it became really clear to me what I wanted to do when I grew up, because I looked in that room, I said, man, there's one person or there's a team of people that's on the field playing the game, that's generating all the value.

4:15Bobby Ma: And the reality is everyone else around there were, you know, they were making their, you know, making their money off the valley, being created by that team that was on the field. And so that was my first aha moment, whereas, man, I want to be in that management team seat on the field, playing the game, building a business and not in these other seats or the currency that I was in. So that was one of the big things that brought me outside of finance. And I said, hey, you know, I got to go get myself out to the Bay Area, which seemed like where a lot of the action was. And I did that via business school.

4:46Bobby Ma: And then the other thing that clicked for me is, you know, what did I think my competitive advantage was. And I, you know, maybe this is a little embarrassing, but or not. But early on, I was like, man, I'm definitely not going to be the smartest person in the room. I've had a chance to be in rooms with a lot of really smart people. And I'm like, you know, you're a best, like, you know, a grinder, right? That was my mind. It's like, hey, like, have some fundamentals, but never going to be the smartest person in the room. So what's your real competitive advantage here? And for me, it was, I was always down to work really hard.

5:16Bobby Ma: and a lot of people say this and I'm talking about the level where the hard work hardos say oh that guy works hard right that's how I will qualify because everyone you talk to I work hard my bar is like the people who truly work hard when you ask them hey who who works hard that that is where I pride in myself upon being and then also the other competitive advantage I thought I had was I wasn't afraid to go to zero and what I mean by that is I just wasn't afraid to lose everything. Great. Went to good schools, have a good start of career. If I have to go back to zero, that's fine. As long as I'm chasing the right targets.

5:53Bobby Ma: And a lot of that came from a couple, just seeing a couple of generations of my family go to zero. Whether it's my grandparents' generation in China, the cultural revolution coming out of that, rebuilding themselves to a good place. Whether it's my parents or my wife's parents, immigrants to the U.S. starting at zero, building up to a good place. And so for me, it's, hey, zero is no big deal. You can always come back. And so when I looked at combining those two things that, man, I want to be, I think my competitive advantage is being an elite level hard worker, plus just a risk appetite of I'm willing to put it all on the line.

6:26Bobby Ma: And I have that confidence that was given to me by my family that I can build myself back up. That's what got me to the Bay Area, as I mentioned, and looking for opportunities ultimately is similar to the one that I took with Column. And then listen, when the founder of Plaid calls you up and says, hey, it's time to go start a company together, there's really only one right answer. You drop out of business school and you say, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, for sure.

6:49Alex Du: And clearly the founder of Plaid doesn't just reach out to anybody. And to your point, you worked super hard to get to where you are. How did you meet William and the founder of Plaid in the first place?

6:58Bobby Ma: Yeah, so I was at the GSB and there's a GSB connection there. and you know William who is the CEO of Calm today he had this choice for who he could have worked with to go do this and I think he which I think was a was a good decision on his part obviously it's a little self-serving for me to say it was a good decision but he didn't want a proven entity you know he could have go tapped a whole network of people who had the resume built companies I think he thought back to when he first started applied and said hey I want I want someone that's that's hungry, that hasn't done it before, that wants to put it all on the line.

7:34Bobby Ma: And this was about eight years ago. And that was, I mean, that was my profile. I happened to be where he was looking. That was my mindset. You know, going back to where I thought my competitive advantage was, I was ready to put it all on the line, go for it. And where failure just wasn't really an option. Where I was like, hey, I'm going to be okay with failure, but I'm going to do whatever I can to make this thing work. And that was the mindset I brought to it. And one of the things that a lot of people don't know is I didn't work for any equity initially for the first six months. And that was just a level of buy-in that, you know, when I say put on the line, right.

8:06Bobby Ma: And Bobby, you've seen this guys come from PE or finance. So like, I want to, I want to take a risk. I want to operate. And they come in and I I'm on the other side now and like, Hey, here's my, here's my comp expectation or here's what I think I should be doing. I'm like, man, that's not, that's not taking the risk boss. That's like, you know, it sounds like you just want to play different game yeah eight years ago i i just had a mentality of like let's let's truly bet on myself you know don't give me equity day one i'll work for hourly wage and then let me prove that out right and obviously over time you know that that's all that's all played out nicely but early on i don't want anything i want to i want to earn everything that comes my way and that was the mentality and i think william probably saw something there that was compelling and we had we've had a great relationship ever since.

8:53Alex Du: That's super admirable and clearly a great platform to invest behind. And I know you guys have been described as meticulously crafting a really good and excellent organization and one that is profitable today. Just talk about how you shape the company's culture from ground zero, employee number one, towards really getting a lot of people who are like you, who are willing to risk everything in bed and work hard to develop a column into what it is today.

9:19Bobby Ma: Yeah, my big thing, if you ask anyone at Column today, the phrase I use all the time is championship DNA. And there's so much tied into that phrase that bleeds into our culture, I think is important for our culture. And if you look at sports as a good analogy, good players want to play with good players. And so when I think about the culture and the upstream decisions we make, it's so important that we have an extremely high hiring bar, that we're not hiring because we need a body. We're hiring because we're getting the people that we want, right, who can make an impact on the business, especially early on those first employees.

9:56Bobby Ma: Good people want to play with good people and that compounds. And we've been able to see that over the last couple of years. And our bar is still very high. Our team is still extremely small and our process is extremely rigorous. But what that means is if you join Column today and you went through a really brutal process, you're like, wow, I can't believe they put me through all that. Well, guess what? We put everyone else on the team through that too. So you can feel good that when you show up to work, you're playing ball with a championship team. And the downstream of that is also making sure that we're staying on top of performance, right?

10:29Bobby Ma: We're staying on top of performance. We're staying on top of things that detract from championship DNA, like ego, right? We need people who, a bunch of A players who work together well, and you can't have ego in that room. when you have all these eight players, everyone's good at what they do. Everyone needs to find a way to work together to figure out, right? And so bringing in that right talent and also policing things like ego that comes up over time. Those are all these things. And at the end of the day, championship DNA is also just a, hey, do we like each other? Do we want to be around each other?

11:01Bobby Ma: That locker room culture, if you think about sports, right? Why do teams with superstars sometimes lose to other teams that just gel well together? How does a team that doesn't have a superstar goal and win the championship it's because they have that culture where the folks in the locker room are working together they like each other they're after practice they're hanging out together and you see a lot of that in calm today um you know many folks at calm live in the same neighborhoods hang out on the weekends people hang out after work it's really not just about the work obviously we're all here to win and to work really hard but we all like each other and we all respect each other.

11:40Bobby Ma: Um, and we all have grand ambition, right? And that's the other thing I'll set, uh, for the culture is we're not here playing for singles and doubles. That starts with William. He's, he's already got a home run. He's playing for a grand slam. Um, and my mentality was always, I, if I'm standing on for, you know, if I just hit a single, I'm not satisfied. I want the double next. I want the triple. I want, and so yeah, Colm's done well for the last six years, but you know, him, I, and the rest of the leadership team, we're looking at the 10x from here. And we think we can do that over the next couple of years.

12:10Bobby Ma: And so we're always looking ahead, swinging for the fence from a top-down perspective and from a bottom-up perspective, really focusing on the team that's executing day to day.

12:21Alex Du: That's awesome to hear. And I've always really enjoyed my sports themes. It's always great to work with people who just really care and are looking to succeed. And speaking from the last six years and to what you've built now into a winning organization, who would you say is the ideal Column customer? And what are some of the examples of what you build and how that enables what your customers are building?

12:43Bobby Ma: So at this point, anyone that touches or moves US dollars and soon a couple other currencies as well globally can work with Column. Our platform is really meant to be the full stack backend infrastructure for anyone that is touching financial services. And as a couple examples, You know, one of our clients is Ramp. They issue cards for international use cases through another company, Slash, for example, is a pretty high growth card-based company. But one of the products that they use with us is our stable coin orchestration product, which is a different variety from international card issuance.

13:23Bobby Ma: You have a company called Built, right, for rent, points on rent initially. Now they're doing a bunch of other stuff, but a consumer credit card company that is issued on Column. You have a company like Watt for cross-border payments. They're doing their USD clearing through Column. Then on parts of the business where folks don't think that much about where Column supports property management is a good example. So there are large-scale property managers that manage thousands of units that work with Column today to hold and move funds and not traditionally a quote-unquote fintech that people might think about, but these property management businesses have complex funds flows.

14:02Bobby Ma: They have all these different units that they need to collect tenant payments from. They have expenses to contractors. Then they have to pay out to investors. There's a reconciliation across all of that. And they can do that with our system better than any other banking platform they can do it with. So that's an area that we have quite a bit of growth and the support that may not be obvious. Another area is other banks. Most people think about the fintech globalist work. We actually also work with a lot of other banks. And what do these other banks do? Pretty much the same thing that the fintechs do with us.

14:32Bobby Ma: which is they use us to process payments, hold U.S. dollars, move money, the exact same use cases. And we use the exact same platform, but it's just a different category of customers. So we have banks internationally and domestically that use us for it. So really at this point, we probably have the widest set of product capabilities from a banking infrastructure perspective and also the deepest. And what I mean by the deepest is we build all of our technology in-house. And so everything, when you work with Column, you touch Column's API or integrate with us or use our dashboard, 100 % of that data and 100 % of the infrastructure sits with Column.

15:11Bobby Ma: And that just enables us to move so much faster, ship more product and do more things than any other platform, than any other bank in the country.

15:20Alex Du: Great, awesome. I think one thing I always really appreciate about FinTech is that it's very much you're solving complex problems for people. And what really resonated with me is you're working with complex funds flows and anything that touches that. Like, how do y 'all build something that enables you to move so quickly and so much better? And at the cutting edge, as you described, that beats out all the other products on the market.

15:42Bobby Ma: It starts with just owning all of our data and all of our technology in-house. And that's doing the really hard work up front of getting that foundation and platform set up right. And I think a lot of people within fintech and financial services, they try to take the shortcut and they buy the off-the-shelf solution. And the reality is if you buy the off-the-shelf solution, you end up with an amalgamation of different providers that ultimately are your backend stack. And maybe that's okay for your MVP launch. Maybe that's okay for the VZero product you have. But what happens is you need to iterate with the feedback that you're getting from the market.

16:19Bobby Ma: and as your customers come to you and ask for that iteration, you want to be able to deliver. And if you don't control your backend infrastructure because it's a Frankenstein of six, seven different other platforms, you can't deliver that because what do you have to do? I now have to make six calls to try to piece something together because it's very rigid, right? It's not, I bought an out-of-box solution from six different people, put it together. Now I have to make a change to go service my customer. I can't. I need six different people to make changes for me to go do that. Versus you do the hard stuff.

16:53Bobby Ma: And what we did was we did the hard stuff up front. And what I always say is from the hardware up to the API surface there, everything in between, hardware, software, all the different layers of the FinTech stack are in-house. But what that means is when we need to do quick iteration and we need to make changes and ship new products, that's all controlled in-house. We can make those decisions. We can move quickly. And that's a big difference maker in our ability to ship and continue to service our clients. And like I said at the start, be at the technological frontier versus a lot of the other players who, yeah, maybe they have a V0 product, V1, that looks comparable to something we do.

17:30Bobby Ma: But over time, it's just not as resilient and flexible.

17:34Alex Du: And one thing that really sets you apart and something you all prioritize as the first action is getting a bank charter. and I know it's been a recent trend where a lot of other folks are also pursuing their own charters. So what's your moat beyond that and what do you think of the trend and the usage of column going forward?

17:53Bobby Ma: We get a lot of credit for our technology and culture and some of the stuff we've talked about. I'll highlight an area that I don't think we get much credit for that really is a big value driver as well. And it's the scale and stability of our business at this point. What do I mean by that? If I think about payments and I think about banking, it is a 99.99 % game, right? Where most of the times it works and you as a user don't think about the banking infrastructure behind it. It doesn't matter. The balance in your account looks right. Money is coming in at the right time, at the right amount. You don't care about what's going on behind the scenes.

18:32Bobby Ma: But in that one edge case, right? You're trying to make a Venmo payment and for some reason it doesn't go through. You're sending an international wire and it's been eight days. hey, you see, you want to do a chargeback, but you can't on your card for whatever reason. There are all these different things that might come up on the edge. And there's millions of these edge cases that ultimately generate almost all of the cost and operating complexity of the business that I'm in. And the value of Column is that because we process on an annualized basis$4 trillion a year, and because we've been doing this at the scale and with the technology we have for longer than anyone else, we've seen these edge cases we're more resilient and we're more stable and we can go solve that in the way that our competitors you know we don't really have a direct competitor I would say I think there are folks who compete with us in different parts of our business but let's just say across the business like I don't think there's anyone that we would go up against that can really say that at the scale and edge case discovery that we have and so that is not something that you can just buy day one.

19:35Bobby Ma: That's not something that a charter gives you day one. A charter is a sheet of paper. And then everything else that happens after that is where the value comes from. And so generally speaking, the market right now, there's a lot of chatter around the charter. I think it's heavily overblown. We got a charter. It's not like the next day we had a valuable company. It is really through the edge case discovery, the scale, spending time in the darkest corners of legacy financial infrastructure, right? I'm talking about integrations where there's no, it's not something like I'll point my agent at these docs or there's this MCP and everything.

20:13Bobby Ma: I can vibe code something. It's this guy who built this part of the platform in the 80s, no longer works at this company. And so if you guys want to figure it out, we're going to have to go on the learning journey together to get this integration done. That's not something you can point at the vibe code. And so it's all these little things. that add up, these edge cases, these deep industry network, the tribal knowledge that you have to get to at these legacy organizations, all these different things that you have to do that ultimately builds us to where we are today in the value prop we have.

20:48Bobby Ma: And it's just not something that having a charter does or just getting into the space can get you.

20:54Alex Du: Yeah, gotcha. And as a COO, I'm sure you've had a lot of touch points and building out an excellent team to help handle these edge cases. What would you say are best practices that you've done that sets Column apart towards actually working with your clients? And to your point, there's a lot of tribal knowledge and which requires really thoughtful ways to solve these issues. So what are things that have worked that makes Column a leading organization in this aspect?

21:17Bobby Ma: I think the thing that, let's go back to the Coltrane Championship DNA piece is the level of ownership on our team is extremely high, right? And people use the term extreme ownership, which I love. And we have that on our team. And where that applies is when problems come up at Column, multiple people raise their hand to be the person to go solve the problem. And I think that's pretty unique from an organizational perspective. I think in many organizations, you might have a cross-functional problem come up, you know, what I call a jump ball. It falls in between three different functions and people in each function are like,

21:53Alex Du: you know what, this is, it might be this,

21:55Bobby Ma: yeah, let's ship it over to finance, let's ship it over to the payment office, let's ship it over, whatever. It's like, I'm only partially involved, but everyone's partially involved when you have a tragedy to comment situation. What I love about Calm and our team is that when we have these jump balls, so these edge cases come up, there's a jump ball, right? Everybody's diving on it. It doesn't matter. If it's touching someone on team, people are volunteering, hey, let me go get after this. And that helps what we're talking about, right? Like issues will emerge. We're going to learn new things.

22:27Bobby Ma: When you're processing at the scale we're processing at and you're at the frontier, you're discovering edge cases all the time. And it actually doesn't make sense to try to get ahead of it all because then you're burning all this time for something that you don't, it's like an amorphous problem, right? Really the best way you can do it is the problem comes up, you solve it as quickly as you can and you build that to the feedback loop so you solve it going forward. And then a new problem comes up and you do that. And over time, you just keep doing that and you have this machine that is just extremely well-trained.

22:57Bobby Ma: And the only way you can do that is you have team members who are just willing to jump on the ball and make a play. And that's what, you know, like I said, I can't give enough credit to the team here. When we have problems come up, everybody wants the ball in their hands. And that's just like a fun environment to be around, right? Everyone's like, hey, like, I'll carry the rock. Like, let me do it. I'm good. Not for the glory, not for anything else, because they have extreme ownership. They want the team to win. They want the company to win. And so multiple hands get raised every time we have something come up.

23:27Bobby Ma: And that's just, you can't build that culture overnight. That is a compounding thing that we have, and it's just a great feedback loop.

23:35Alex Du: Perfect. And one other aspect of Column, I think that really stood out to me between your answer and also our pre-call is just how much, I guess, international clinical business there is between the correspondent banking product, Stablecoin, and B2B cross-border. Where in the roadmap of building Column did you identify the cross-border, the international Sheldman has a key growth area and key product area that customers would demand, given people envision like financial systems to be the laws and regulations to be pretty insulated from outside. But knowing that transaction flows happen internationally.

24:10Bobby Ma: Yeah. You know, money is moving cross border more than ever. Right. And so for us, it's what do our customers care about? What are they looking for? That's obviously where we're going to go. Where are they pushing the frontier? especially post-COVID, there's a lot more remote work. There's a lot more cross-border work. And that really brought on a wave of a need for multi-currency, a need for international, a need for stablecoins obviously got big over the same period. And I'm sure there were some other driving factors as well. But for us, it's, hey, where are our clients going? Where are the folks that we spend all of our day serving?

24:46Bobby Ma: What's most interesting to them? And I would say over the last two, three years, we've really seen a big push in international. Across the board from, you know, most of our larger clients, they're getting more international. And as they get more international, they need things like multi-currency accounts. They need things like stablecoin on-ramp offering. They need things like being able to issue cards internationally. They need to be able to open up bank accounts for global, global businesses that may not necessarily be incorporated in the U.S. These are all these things that we see the demand coming in for.

25:18Bobby Ma: And And we want to meet the demand and be able to service that.

25:24Alex Du: Yeah, that's great to hear. And speaking of the future outlook and emerging technologies, and I know AI is such a big buzzword these days, but it has clearly changed how we work. So could you just walk us through how it has changed Column and also bank operations more broadly versus where it's just mostly noise and a buzzword?

25:42Bobby Ma: Yeah, I love this question because Column is maybe the opposite of some companies where we are DNA-wise an AI company, but we don't bang the table on it and try to get in front of everyone's face and say we are an AI company. Whereas some other companies maybe aren't AI companies and they're claiming they're AI companies. And here's what I mean by that. Banks have a lot of data and they're very process and procedural heavy. And so if I think about us in the pre-AI world, we had a lot of data that we owned, which is, okay, that's great from an AI perspective. And we also had a lot of process and procedures as a regulated bank.

26:20Bobby Ma: Okay, also great. Like two areas that are very good AI tailwinds. And the other, and maybe the third area among many that are obvious AI tailwinds is our product day one was built machine to machine. You know, everyone's talking about machine to machine. Our product was built like that. You know, we were a, we're an API first company. It was no dashboard initially. And so there were all these different fundamental parts of our business that were very AI friendly. And then when the AI tailwind really started getting going called about two, three years ago, we were massive beneficiaries of that.

26:53Bobby Ma: So I can break that down, right? From a bank operations side, right? A lot of processes and procedures. So we have been able to automate a significantly large amount of process and procedure across many different functions. Talk about payment operations, right? How we triage payments inquiries that come in. You talk about legal risk and compliance. On the compliance side, man, there's a large amount of areas where you can use AI to move faster and be more efficient. Transaction monitoring is a very obvious area. You know, all the way through to how our BSA team works. On the finance side, there's so many operations that we've used AI to automate.

27:38Bobby Ma: one of my favorite things is we have an internal apps marketplace where anybody and this is an expectation of everyone on the company is everyone should be looking to automate all the operational processes of their job that is possible right and they can use claw code to ship product directly to an internal app marketplace that other people at the company can use and that's really taken off in a major way and we've been able to replace a lot of third-party tools that we had because one the obvious question is, hey, we're paying all this money to all these vendors to do stuff with our data. And what are they doing?

28:10Bobby Ma: It's just a UI and a workflow. Okay, well, go ask Cloud to create that UI and workflow on top of the data that we already have. And more times than not, what we found is within a couple months, we've been able to call up a lot of these third-party vendors and say, yeah, we don't need you anymore. We're just running it all in-house. And it's even better than in-house because we can just ship changes. Like the users of the product are now the product managers and can just ship changes in that internal marketplace. And so that's on the process and procedure perspective at the bank. If I look across every function of the bank, we have been able to make significant efficiency gains by building our internal applications on top of our own data and building out workflows ourselves, especially on the non-technical side, which has been the big unlock, that has allowed us to unlock great efficiencies.

28:58Bobby Ma: That's on the operation side. And then when I think about engaging you know with our customers in the market we're shipping faster than ever and i think this is pretty consistent across a lot of companies obviously we can ship more code the product velocity has gone up significantly and so a lot of these products we're talking about maybe in the old world these are one to two year product builds you know now we're shipping what we was probably shipping two to three years we're shipping one to two quarters and that's really great compound but especially like what we talked about a lot of the international stuff that's all come up in the last year.

29:33Bobby Ma: Man, we've built entire businesses, right? If you think about stablecoin orchestration, multi-currency, cross-border payment, built entire businesses in the order of quarters and shipped those products. And that's just not something that was possible to do pre-AI. And like I said, we had the compound benefits because everything was in place for us to go take advantage of it because we had the right underlying fundamentals of controlling our own data. and so you know because come back to the start i after now that i've shared all this color i do think it's funny because calm at its core i believe is one of the most ai companies out there but we really aren't you know i'll start another metric which is you look at our head count right as just a metric we're we're like 150 people at the productivity levels we're at like let's just look at the numbers as the proof versus making up other proof points there's only the only way we could have possibly achieved this level of efficiency of doing a couple million of revenue per employee is if we were really world-class on the AI front.

30:36Bobby Ma: Otherwise, you can't post numbers like that. So anyways, it's always funny to me because you see a lot of companies who really aren't AI companies who are AI presenting, and we truly are the opposite. And maybe that's feedback to me that we should probably say we're an AI company a little bit more.

30:51Alex Du: Yeah, that's fantastic to hear. And I think on the flip side, you hear a lot of traditional banking institutions, they say use COBOL as part of the banking core. They are some of the slowest people to adopt the cloud. And I think maybe you already answered this in your last response, but how do you think Column is able to really take advantage of emerging trends better and be more efficient when you're not as shackled to sort of the old guard, the old tribal knowledge as some of the more traditional players who've just been around for almost a century.

31:24Bobby Ma: I mean, it definitely just goes back to the fact that we understand our workflow as well. We own all of our data. And that just allows us to ship significantly faster. And what that means is whenever something comes out, we can take a look at it and say, yeah, we can go build it. Like for most things and nearly almost everything in our space, we can go build. And so really the decision is, and we can ship it fast now. with the AI tailwind, right? And so for us, it's never a, oh man, these guys are doing this and we should go acquire it so we can have the capability or hiring people who know how to do it or, you know, any of that, or get nervous, like, oh man, like we're falling behind.

32:07Bobby Ma: For us, it's, hey, let's go build it. And if we think it's important for our customers, what we'll do, and that's what we've done over the last year between, you know, the stable coins, multi-currency, and all these products that we shipped, it's, there are companies that do it. And we said, great, we have all of the fundamentals and building blocks in-house to go do it ourselves. And we do it in one to two quarters.

32:28Alex Du: Yeah, super impressive. And speaking of building things out, what is on the product roadmap to position Column to be the winning financial infrastructure company for your customers to get excited about? And also, what are people getting wrong about what Column is today and your place in the competitive landscape?

32:46Bobby Ma: Yeah, our goal is just to be the banking platform for all of your needs, right? No matter what kind of company you are, if you're touching financial services, you should be able to work with Calm to do that. And we are well on our way there. There's a lot of surface area there and we'll continue building that surface area. Once again, we've talked about a lot of products that we just shipped this year that expands that surface area from where we were before by quite a bit amount. will continue to harden that. And then there's other areas. If you think about multi-currency, that's a never-ending battle because there are many, many currencies.

33:21Bobby Ma: And there's like some ROI of at some point, you really want to be building deep to the infrastructure layer in a super long tail currency. But that's a bit of a never-ending game. You can do international in general. It's kind of this never-ending game. You can always go deeper. You can also build up the stack more, which is something that we're thinking about. For example, card issuing. Originally, we were a bin sponsor. now we're doing issuer processing. Are there other things that we can bring together so that our customers can show up with less that they have to build on their side so they can work with us a little bit more in the out-of-the-box way while still holding some things that they care about, like on the customer engagement side.

33:59Bobby Ma: But these are all things that we're going to continue to iterate on over time with the goal ultimately of, hey, no matter who you are, you're showing up to call them, you have a financial services product that you want to go offer or use, we're going to be the best outlet for you to go do that and be able to provide your best tooling for that. Well, super exciting. I think I also had the second question there.

34:22Alex Du: Oh, the second question was, what do most people get wrong about Calm today?

34:27Bobby Ma: So I talked a little bit about this earlier. Most people know us for the fintechs that we work with because they see us in the disclosures or, you know, that's how they, that's how it was our V1, you know, let's say the first act of the business. What most people don't know is we have multiple business lines that are doing anywhere between 10 to 250 million net revenue a year. And it's not just fintechs, right? It's serving other banks. It's serving multinational companies. It's servicing things like property managers, like we talked about. It's servicing, I mentioned banks, but the international and domestic community banks as well.

35:02Bobby Ma: It is servicing all types of companies. So folks know the fintech side, but what they don't see is a very large part of the business that is servicing every other type of company as well. And so I would say what maybe is not obvious from the outside in is just how big the TAM of our business is. If I think about the overall TAM of Column, it is just global banking infrastructure, right? Global payments. And anything that touches money movement globally, we can put a dent into and we can go build into. And that's a pretty large, that's a much bigger market than what maybe some people initially think of is Elcom works at FinTechs.

35:40Bobby Ma: We can really work with any company that is looking to offer financial services globally. Cool.

35:46Alex Du: And switching gears to your entrepreneurship journey, and this is for the student side of our podcast listeners, and for those folks weighing something to joining early or actually going out and building your own thing, how did you think about that trade-off when you moved all the way to Stanford GSB into California to be part of the whole action.

36:09Bobby Ma: Well, you know what I just realized, Bobby, is we right now have the same amount of MBA degree because you're a little bit into your second year, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is right around when I dropped out. So we have about, you know, in a couple more months, we'll have more MBA than I do. But as of right now, we're about equal amounts of MBA education. On your question, joining earlier, building on your own, number one thing is leave the ego aside. It's, I find a lot of people want to go start a company because they want to be a founder CEO. And I think that is a terrible reason to go start a company.

36:40Bobby Ma: And I, and maybe that works sometimes from what I've seen that generally doesn't work because when things get hard, where are you going to dig into on the grit side? And usually where that comes from is just a passion around solving a problem or trying to go build something like a passion to go build something and not necessarily being the black turtleneck founder CEO type. And so the first thing I would say is leave the ego aside and really say, hey, if I'm going to go start this company, is it because I just really believe in this problem statement? I want to go hard at this problem statement.

37:12Bobby Ma: And when I inevitably have to pivot 10 times and get it wrong a hundred times, I'm still going to show up to work every day with a smile on, be able to galvanize the troops and go hard. If that's a problem statement, if that's a problem statement that gets you excited about and it's broadly a big space and you can get the right people around you to go do it, go do your own thing. That makes sense. But my criteria essentially is find the right problem space and the right team. The problem space has to be something that you believe in, that you actually want to work towards, and it's a big enough problem space.

37:43Bobby Ma: And then if you add that with the right team, what's inevitably going to happen is probably going to screw it up for a couple of years, you know make every mistake in the book but then if you just keep showing up every single day one one day it'll be oh shit maybe we actually have something here and then it'll start compounding but be honest with yourself that's more often than not that's not starting your own thing and that means joining something early maybe it is but that's that's the framework that i used and i think you just have to be honest with yourself of if if you're the guy or girl to go do that or if you should be teaming up with some other people to do it obviously for me the right answer was to team up with William to go do this.

38:20Bobby Ma: Yeah, that's really great advice.

38:21Alex Du: And I think a very commonly thrown around phrase is founders decide to be a founder and then they find the problem. But maybe the right advice is actually you have to be someone who wants to go solve a problem. And then whether that's starting your own thing or joining someone super early on, that's where you decide. But I think the stuff about getting rid of your ego and putting ego the side really resonates. And I guess for folks out there, I think one thing that was really cool about your story was it's a big call to just drop out of an MBA program. And so how did you figure out that column was the thing that was worth dropping out of?

38:58Alex Du: And what are the frameworks and decision-making criteria you have for other people, whether they're in school or outside and doing something else to see something that is worth dropping what you have going on to go pursue with all your effort.

39:12Bobby Ma: It's kind of the same as what I was saying before. There's, and this is kind of like a framework that I built when I was at the GSP and we had a bunch of early stage VCs come in and, you know, I kind of distilled everything they were saying. Everyone has like different frameworks and things like that. And to me, to kind of simplify it for my, like I said, slower brain, not a genius level mind, it was really just a couple of things. One is, hey, is the problem space big enough and do you have the right team when it's super early stage? I think if you and if you check both those two boxes then get to work action creates information information creates a feedback loop that allows you to compound and you'll eventually get to where you want but those things need to be true you need to be in a problem space that's big enough if you have a great team and you're the wrong problem space it's too small you're not going to get to where you want to go it's under optimized if you're in the right problem space and you don't have a great team it's just a bunch of you know idiots emotion which is like not actually not necessarily a negative thing.

40:09Bobby Ma: That usually generates some good outcomes, but it's not going to get you the optimal solution. Maybe not enough to drop out. And so if you look at a problem statement and you say, hey, man, this is a big space. I like the problem statement and I really like this team. Yeah, go for it. Time, like get moving. Create information for yourself and the feedback movement start compounding.

40:30Alex Du: Awesome. Really exciting company and congratulations on all the success Column has built so far. And we here at the Wharton Fintech Podcast look forward to everything that's in store for the company and yourself. We really appreciate you taking the time today. And this has been a really fantastic conversation to learn more about Column and also all the advice you have and sticking and betting on yourself and picking up the best idea.

40:54Bobby Ma: Yeah, thank you, Bobby. Thanks for having me. It was a good time.

40:59Alex Du: Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Wharton Fintech Podcast. We hope you enjoyed, and please leave a review and follow us on social media. We appreciate you tuning in and hope you will continue sharing the podcast with additional listeners. Until next time, this is your host, Bobby Ma.