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Episode 646 Mo Al Adham from Frec

Bank On It · 2025-02-06 · 32 min

0:00--:--

Key moments - from our scoring

Substance score

56 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density11 / 20
Originality12 / 20
Guest Caliber13 / 20
Specificity & Evidence13 / 20
Conversational Craft7 / 20

Frec is a direct-to-consumer platform enabling self-managed investors to access sophisticated wealth management tools - specifically direct indexing - traditionally available only through premium private banking, but at significantly lower costs. Mo Al Adham explains that direct indexing allows investors to hold baskets of individual stocks that replicate index performance while generating harvestable capital losses to offset future tax events like asset sales or inheritance gains. Unlike competitors like Fidelity (which charges 0.4% via Fitfolio), Schwab, and Vanguard, Frec addresses a critical UX problem: most legacy products become economically unfavorable after 5-10 years when the portfolio cost basis grows beyond loss-harvesting utility, yet customers remain trapped paying premium fees. Al Adham draws parallels to his experience as an early advisor to Instacart and product lead at Twitter, emphasizing obsessive attention to customer experience - from image quality to transparent pricing structures. His go-to-market strategy relies entirely on word-of-mouth virality, with notable sign-up spikes during holiday periods when customers share discoveries with family. The episode is valuable for operators building fintech products, particularly those targeting the growing segment of affluent, tech-comfortable self-directed investors who resent incumbents' indifference to long-term customer value.

Key takeaways

  • →Direct indexing creates a 'tax alpha' by generating harvestable capital losses while matching index returns, but only works profitably when fairly priced - legacy competitors charge 0.37% premiums that become economically irrational after 5-10 years.
  • →Word-of-mouth growth spikes during holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's) are a reliable signal of product-market fit and virality, a pattern Al Adham observed at both Twitter and now applies at Frec.
  • →Customer development - asking users directly what to build next rather than relying solely on internal metrics - is the most reliable method for sequencing product bets when runway is limited to 3-4 years.
  • →Building a genuinely superior user experience in financial products (transparent fees, clear benchmark comparisons, quality information design) creates competitive moat against distribution-heavy incumbents like Fidelity and Vanguard who neglect UX because they already own shelf space.
  • →Direct indexing remains niche because it requires specific customer profiles (those with capital gains, technical sophistication, sufficient assets), making traditional wealth advisor distribution ineffective despite repeated pitches.

Guests

Mo Al Adham

Topics in this episode

Product-market fitSchwabCustomer DevelopmentTax-loss harvestingdirect indexingAssets under management (AUM)Capital gains offsetFidelity FitfolioVanguard VOO ETFSelf-directed investing

Questions this episode answers

How does direct indexing work and who benefits from it?

Direct indexing involves holding baskets of individual stocks that replicate index performance while generating harvestable capital losses. It benefits investors who expect capital gains events (asset sales, inheritance) and can offset those gains with accumulated losses, creating tax efficiency unavailable in standard ETFs like VOO.

Why do Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard's direct indexing products become bad deals over time?

These competitors charge 0.37% to 0.4% annual premiums above index ETF costs, which makes sense only during the first 5-10 years while the portfolio actively harvests losses. After that window closes but cost basis grows, customers still pay inflated fees with no tax benefit, yet switching is operationally painful.

How does Frec acquire customers if it's not selling through banks or wealth advisors?

Frec relies entirely on direct-to-consumer word-of-mouth growth, with founders manually demoing the product to early adopters and tracking holiday-period sign-up spikes as proof of virality when customers share the product with family.

What did Mo Al Adham learn from advising Instacart that he applied to Frec?

Al Adham observed Apoorva Mehta's obsession with customer experience details - including photographing every item at Trader Joe's to ensure quality product imagery - rather than cutting corners. He applies this principle to Frec's pricing transparency and long-term UX design, ensuring fees remain fair even after loss harvesting stops working.

How does Mo track whether Frec is working without waiting a full year for data?

He monitors weekly growth rates, assets under management, signups per product, and seasonal trends week-over-week, comparing performance to the same week last year to identify patterns and guide development priorities.

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

11 / 20

The episode has a handful of genuinely useful insights - the cost-basis erosion argument against legacy direct-indexing products and using holiday signup spikes as a word-of-mouth proxy - but large portions are biographical filler, Instacart nostalgia, and a generic 'who would you have dinner with' close. The insight-per-minute ratio is mediocre for a 32-minute episode.

you're going to get these capital losses for maybe 1, 2, 3, maybe 5, 10 years tops. And then your cost basis is just going to, your portfolio is just going to outgrow the cost basis. So you're not harvesting losses anymore, but you're stuck paying that 37 basis point premium forever.
our biggest spikes in signups are during Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving week, or even Christmas or New Year's week, where people are back home maybe visiting family, telling them about the new things they've discovered

Originality

12 / 20

The seasonal-spike-as-WOM-signal framing and the specific argument that direct indexing's value decays as cost basis grows (while fees persist) are non-obvious and useful. However, most of the startup advice - talk to customers, build a great product, word of mouth matters - is recycled playbook, and the Charlie Munger fan-boy close is a cliché.

Twitter before sort of like the Elon acquisition. I just always like to make that disclaimer... we had always a spike in traffic during Christmas break... people were just telling their friends about it
what used to be mutual funds now became ETFs. And what are today ETFs are going to be direct indices in the future

Guest Caliber

13 / 20

Mo is a genuine practitioner - product lead at Twitter, first advisor at Instacart, and now an operating CEO with a real, regulated financial product. He speaks from first-hand experience rather than theory, and his personal wealth-management frustration as product origin is credible. He is not a marquee name, but he is not a fluff guest either.

we hit $100 million in assets under management within nine months of launching, which is, uh, shocking to me. I didn't think that would happen.
I was the first advisor at Instacart... they incubated their company at my first startup's office

Specificity & Evidence

13 / 20

The episode is anchored by concrete, verifiable numbers: Fidelity's Fitfolio at 40bps vs. Vanguard VOO at 3bps vs. Frec's 7bps premium, $100M AUM in 9 months, company founded September 2021, launched October 3 (approximately 16 months prior to recording). These specifics elevate the episode meaningfully above hand-waving, though some claims (2% tax alpha, 'millions in marketing') are left unchallenged and unquantified.

They have a product called fitfolio. You pay 0.4% for it right now, relative to, like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF Voo, which is priced at 0.03%. You're paying a 0.37% every year premium
we hit $100 million in assets under management within nine months of launching

Conversational Craft

7 / 20

The host is affable but rarely sharp - he asks a sprawling hummus/grocery-store analogy question that takes over a minute to land, pursues irrelevant biographical tangents (Instacart office space, University of Waterloo), and closes with the generic 'who would you spend a day with' question. He does not push back on the 'no marketing spend' claim, does not probe the 7bps fee sustainability, and lets several big claims pass unchallenged.

So you mentioned if we could transition back then to like you said that the founders of Instacart, you went to school with them. Was it the University of Waterloo in Canada, is that.
if you could spend a day with anyone ever, whether person is currently alive or past, who would it be and why that person?

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker A71%
  • Speaker B25%
  • Speaker C5%

Most-used words

product44twitter16first15instacart14market13point12office12built11experience11direct11difficult10customers10back10didn10losses10etfs10

Episode notes

This episode was produced remotely using the ListenDeck standardized audio & video production system. If you're looking to jumpstart your podcast miniseries or upgrade your podcast or video production please visit You can

Full transcript

32 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Speaker A: It's showtime. You're listening to the Bank on it show with John Siracusa.

Speaker B: Uh, hi.

Speaker A: This is Wayne Slavin. This is Rick Song. This is Kyle Mack.

Speaker B: This is Eyal Lifshit.

Speaker A: This is Jan Jacob.

Speaker B: This is Imena Alemam.

Speaker A: This is Tom Burgess. This is Rashmi Mulgiri. This is Peter Saver. This is Chris Haramsev. This is Rhett Roberts. This is Omari Akubovich.

Speaker B: This is Tiki Chen.

Speaker A: This is Moala Dam from Frack. And you're listening to the Bank Hornet show with John Saracusa. Um, now without further ado, your host, here's Johnny.

Speaker C: Over the last decade, a lot of amazing technologies and companies have been invested in and built, which created the finance industry as we know it today. A lot has been done, but there's so much more to go. This podcast was created to tell the stories of the people who are building and investing in the future of fintech. Hi, I'm um, John Siracusa, founder and host of the bank on it podcast and founder of Listndeck, a podcast audio and video production company. Um, through my production company and after producing over 1500 episodes in FinTech, I realized every founder and investor has an intuition of a possibility in fintech. And through their superpower, with sheer will and determination, they make that possibility a reality. On this podcast, I discuss with my guests the pattern matching they nurture through experience, personal characteristics and advice. Um, the theories they devise and the means in which they test theories and convert the right ones into reality. This podcast is their story, unscripted.

Speaker B: I'm here to ask the right questions,

Speaker C: to verbalize why they built or invested in the fintechs that they did. If you're looking to build, partner or invest in fintech, this podcast is for you. If you like what you hear in today's episode and want to support us, please feel free to give the show a five star rating and a podcast application of your choice. You can also follow me on Twitter or X and Medium at John Saracusta. Johan S I R A C U S a or on LinkedIn @Saracusa.

Speaker B: So, recording Molly, with me today, I have Mo Aldam. Mo is a founder and CEO of Freck Movie. Mo, thanks for being here today.

Speaker A: Thank you. My pleasure.

Speaker B: Awesome. Great. So why don't we get started with

Speaker C: what exactly is Freck?

Speaker A: So Frec is a platform for self directed investors, folks who like to, uh, manage their own money and it gives them sort of like all the tools and all the intelligent ways that I guess Clients of big private banks, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, et cetera, get but without the exuberant fees. Our main product is a direct indexing product and sort of like that's our flagship and that's where we invest most of our resources on.

Speaker B: So do you sell through those large banks and so on or is this direct to consumer?

Speaker A: It's purely direct to consumer. And so if you're sort of like what we learned is there's sort of like two types of investors out there. There are the investors who enjoy having a human interface, like they want to get a wire transfer out to buy a house and they'll just call someone to get that done. And there's sort of like the second type. And in my opinion the growing segment of the market is folks who are more self managed. They're comfortable using an app, software, a website and they can do these transactions themselves. And that's sort of the segment we're going after.

Speaker B: So how do you attract that sector though?

Speaker A: It's very interesting because when I started the company years ago, all the founders that I talked to in Fintech or in Wealthtech, all the investors that I've also spoken to were cautioning me that it's extremely difficult and costly to attract these customers. And I've learned that for the most part maybe their information wasn't as up to date and that in today's day and age it's actually not that difficult to do it. So the way we do it, our philosophy is like we just spend time building a very good product. A product that makes them happy, a product that speaks to them like they're human and uh, through word of mouth really. So our first call it hundred customers. We just contacted everyone we knew in our circles, like me and the rest of the small team back then contacted folks and said, hey, we built this awesome product, just give it a shot, give it a try. Let's let me give you a demo, right? And so the first hundred people were onboarded like literally manually. Each and every one of them had a zoom demo of the product, right? And then they sort of like fell in love, right? Three months in they were telling their friends about it and then kind of the cycle repeated itself.

Speaker B: So it's actually kind of interesting. I uh, guess it's not really maybe an argument more of like making a product that people care about is important, right? But you know, you go to like say for example supermarkets, right? Like you could have the biggest, best hummus in the world, right? And it could be the best tasting hummus. But you know, if. If Pepsi owns, you know, because they own whatever Saba I think it is, it's not really great hummus. And they own the shelves, they rent the shelves. You don't have any chance, right? Like, you have no chance because you don't have distribution through all these shopping centers and whatnot. So for your product and so on, like, is there that. Where there's like, this hard to break into because some large entity or a bunch of large entities just own the market to a point where it makes it impossible. So walk me through that. It's got to be difficult.

Speaker A: It's a great analogy, actually, because in our world, it's like the Fidelity and the Schwabs of the world and the vanguards of the world, they basically sort of have those shelves in the grocery store, right? And so any new product they launch, they just put it on the shelf. The issue that good or not exactly. Right now, here's the opportunity for us, the opportunity is that the products they put on the shelves are just not good. And people know that, and they can feel it. And so when we put out a great product, even if it's difficult to find those folks who find it and end up telling their friends about it, our biggest spikes in signups are during Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving week, or even Christmas or New Year's week, where people are back home maybe visiting family, telling them about the new things they've discovered, the new products. And it's a good signal that, you know, there's product market fit here because, you know, word of mouth is happening. And, you know, the peculiar thing about sort of like maybe something I learned in a previous chapter of my life and I was at Twitter, was that and Twitter before sort of like the Elon acquisition. I just always like to make that disclaimer. Uh,

Speaker B: It's a good disclaimer to put.

Speaker A: Yes, yeah, totally. Is that we had always a spike in traffic during Christmas break, and people didn't really understand why. Like, is it like people buying new iPhones and downloading the app or what's happening? The truth is people were just telling their friends about it or showing them news or sharing tweets right. During that holiday time. And it's sort of like an indicator that there's something that you've built that's sort of like going viral through word of mouth.

Speaker B: Interesting. That's a very interesting way of looking at it. And so I've never actually heard anybody who said that their product, it's, uh, delivered or I guess spread through word of mouth. They Never use those holiday moments. Right. Like as a, as a measurement point.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It's very interesting. So did you start the company during that time? Like during Christmas and during New Year's and during, like Thanksgiving at one point.

Speaker A: So we started the company, uh, in September 2021. We took two years to build our product. And maybe that's another kind of side point is like, we spent a lot of time, we put in a lot of effort into crafting this product and we launched it in October 3, 20. So almost 15, 16 months ago now. Yeah, when we launched it, it was a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I don't think that first Thanksgiving we saw the signal. We saw the signal like this past Thanksgiving and this past Christmas, New Year's holidays.

Speaker B: So that's my, and that brings me to my question, which is how did you know, like, when that first Thanksgiving. Obviously you're not going to see a lot of signal. It's very new product. Everything is kind of new for the market at least. Maybe you work on it for two years, but it's very new for the market. Right. So how did you figure out, I guess, the patience for success and also what's the balance of patience for success compared to, like, you're not going to have any data.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Uh, how do you know? Right. Uh, like it's, you have to wait till the next Thanksgiving to figure that out. Like, how did you measure what you thought would be this is actually working, even though it might not be as obvious as a Thanksgiving 2024?

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. Um, I think one of the struggles of being a founder is like, you just, no matter what data you look at, you're like, is it working? You just don't really know. And so one of the things that I do to help gauge that, you know, I track our, all of our key metrics, number of signups, assets under management broken down per product on a week to week basis. And I look at our growth rate every single week and I share that out with the team as well. And obviously we look at that monthly and quarterly too. But like, so the week delineation is very important as well. Um, and sort of like you start to see patterns and you can compare seasonality as well. Like this week last year, what happened versus this week this year. And how does that matter? Right. Uh, coming into the new year, there's a lot of energy and sort of like for an investing product, like these past couple of weeks, we were recording on January 13th. Right. But these past couple of weeks, like people coming back from the Holidays, and they're coming to, uh, frac with a lot of vigor. I want to participate in the market. They bring new funds in, just trying to reshape their financial strategy for the following year. And so now we can compare kind of this week's growth to last week's growth and sort of see trends that are seasonally adjusted.

Speaker B: Very interesting. And so there's two things, right? Like, how do you measure success, but also how do you get the information that helps you kind of guide where to go?

Speaker A: Yeah. So obviously, success depends on your business model. If you're sort of like a percentage of aum, um, type of business model, then you want to have your AUM being your North Star metric. If you're just like a subscription product, then you probably want to skew more towards number of customers and what percentage of them pay me for the product. And then create some of these guiding principles or guiding metrics for your team. Right. Knowing what to build is a completely, uh, It's a whole topic. Right? I mean, there's a whole. It's very difficult. And in a previous life, I was a product lead at Twitter, and I launched a bunch of new products. And before that I was the founder of another company.

Speaker B: Twitter before.

Speaker A: Exactly. Twitter before. But, you know, sequencing the bets is extremely difficult. You know, as a founder, you have what, uh, at best, maybe three, four years of Runway or something like that. And how many products can you launch per year? Or how many, like, product bets can you make? And then how do you sequence them? Right. Which one do you do first? Which ones do you do second? And what I found after at least, um, operating this company, is that the best guiding principle for that is your customers. Your customers will tell you exactly what you need to build. And so I have this new habit now of talking directly to our customers. So, uh, you just have to find a good entry point to that. You don't want to be like, hey, can I ask a random question and shoot a question? But you want to say, for example, in our case, here's how your performance has been on FRAC over the past few months. Here's how your direct index has performed. Here's how many tax losses you've harvested. And, uh, by the way, here's what our team is building. How would you edit this list? What are we missing here? What can we do better? Or what have we not thought about? And I send these periodically, and I got a ton of responses. And then it's a question of triaging them and making sure, like, you're working on the things that are most impactful, there's other inputs like cost and how difficult it is and maybe vendors and some other kind of constraints there.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But the most important thing is to get that input directly from your customers who are using the product.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And I'm actually quite curious. So you were at Twitter, you were at Instacart as well, right? Like, you were an advisor there.

Speaker A: So I was an advisor there. I was the first advisor at Instacart.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, so they incubated their company at my first startup's office. So I know Apoorva really well. Max, he's one of our investors at Frack, he's one of the co founders of Instacart as well. And yeah, they, um, didn't have office space back when they first started, so they used a, uh, vacant meeting room in that. My first company was called Twitvid in our office space on California street here in San Francisco.

Speaker B: Is that right?

Speaker A: Yeah. So it was awesome watching them actually go from a concept to like a product, like getting product market fit. And a lot of learnings that I am applying to Frack are actually kind of informed by what I saw at Instacart. Um, that's super interesting.

Speaker B: So wait, so if I can understand this. So they actually incubated out of your office? I mean, your office space. They incubated within a space within your office?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker B: It's crazy.

Speaker A: They didn't have a place to work and this is before they had their first office. And so they use a meeting room.

Speaker B: How did they pitch you about that? Like, uh, can we have an office space? Are you good friends with them? And you said, sure, what? Whatever you need.

Speaker A: No. Well, Apoorva is a very good friend of mine and we went to the same school and I was involved on day zero, I should say, when he came up with the idea for Instacart, when he was still prototyping it. And we were testing it for him and brainstorming the name and the logo and sending the beer to Gary Tan at yc. And so I saw the whole thing unfold in front of my eyes and it was a really rewarding experience. And, uh, he did a lot of things right. He's a phenomenal entrepreneur and he's excellent at, uh, execution and pushing forward and at, uh, hiring and at fundraising. Like, it's just like all five stars. Five out of five on all of these fronts.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so earlier I asked you questions about the market and how to know things and signals you Know, it's like asking a professional soccer player, how do you play so well? Right. It's just doing the basics really well. That's it. Like, really understanding the basics. And like, I. Sometimes I think everybody tries to oversimplify things. What was the one thing you did that made a big difference? And the truth is, it's probably not that it's doing the important things really well. That really. That's it. Right. But that's not really great for a show. And I think that using Instacart as a backdrop to this is a great thing. Because everybody knows Instacart. You see it everywhere now, which is crazy. Right? And this started as a small, you know, founder, two founders who are in a small office in your office. And, like, you saw it all kind of come together. So I'm actually really curious. What did you learn as you were seeing?

Speaker C: What.

Speaker B: What did you have as an understanding before it was there? And then what did you have as an understanding as you saw it grow that you brought to frac?

Speaker A: So one of the things that Instacart did really well. Apoorva, uh, did really well is that he really cared about the customer experience and the user experience. Right. And I remember this so clearly and so vividly. At one point, he went and he took and he bought one item m out of every lucky one to Trader Joe's. Back when they were servicing Trader Joe's, they got banned at some point. And I remember those days really well. But he bought one item out of everything at Trader Joe's. He took all of that bag of things, and he took it to, uh, a, uh, studio, and he took photos of all those items. Right. Uh, and he wanted a great presentation of things that you can buy on Instacart. And he didn't want to scrape the web to get some crappy picture of, like, bags.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And so, you know, the customer experience matters. All these details matter. You know, the quality of the photos of the items you're about to buy and the nutritional information on them, they matter. Right. And like, similarly, in financial products, the space we're in at frac, being able to, you know, have a great experience, being able to see how your investments are doing against a certain benchmark, being able to have selection of, like, what indices you want to invest in, et cetera, all these things matter. And going back to your analogy of a funny, we're talking about grocery stores here of, like, a shelf and, like, the Fidelity putting out products or Vanguard, they don't put that level of care into the products themselves.

Speaker B: No, they don't, because they already have distribution. So they don't give a crap. They just put it out there and you'll buy it. Right, because they have distribution.

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker B: So Instacart, though, does have distribution in some way. Right. Like, because they sell through, like, Costco or something like that, where you can order stuff and have it that day and whatnot. Is there anything like that for frack?

Speaker A: I think our model is a little different.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Two totally different things.

Speaker A: Yeah. In terms of just the distribution model, um, we have been pitched many times this idea of selling through the wealth advisor. I think our challenge for our product, Direct Indexing, is it's a very difficult product to explain and pitch and just be honest about. It's not a product for everyone. And a lot of wealth advisors will frame it as a product for everyone. Hey, you're going to get an extra 2% return tax alpha on your investments. But within the extra 2% that they're promising, if you dig into that, there's a lot of assumptions being made that you have gap gains to offset, that you're actually harvesting that much in losses. It gets very technical and it's very difficult.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you understand then that your market is very specific and that's one of the differences. So you're saying is it's not just the general public or consumer direct to consumer. It's a very specific market and segment.

Speaker A: So direct indexing. Yeah, it is a product for folks who have cap gains. Now it is our belief that more and more of the population is going to be paying capital gains taxes. It's a popular way to, uh, tax wealth in America. And so if you're selling any kind of an asset that has appreciated, you're paying a big chunk of it to the government. There's, like, really smart and perfectly legal ways to offset those taxes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And that's sort of like a strategy that the wealthiest people in America, like, are using today and have been using for decades that really haven't sort of like, come down to the average person yet, mostly because of technological sort of like roadblocks that have now gone like. Yeah.

Speaker C: So let me ask then this, uh,

Speaker B: if I'm oversimplifying it, please correct me and forgive me, but let's say I, I own a house, I sell my house, whatever. Right. Whether it's my house or investment property, what would be more profit? Like, like a investment, uh, property or my own house or. Doesn't matter.

Speaker A: It doesn't matter. That's All.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I have my own house. I have $500,000, uh, more than what I paid for it, I sold it for. Right. And there's going to be some sort of capital gains, uh, in some way, shape or form. Do I then now use FREC and walk, uh, me through that if there's anything there?

Speaker A: Yeah. So let's say you are an investor in the stock market. That's already been happening for you. You've been putting excess cash or income into, uh, let's call it ETFs, right? Popular Vanguard ETFs, Voo, Vti, et cetera, spy. Right. And then you have this event that just happened where you sold something and you have half a million dollars worth of gains. Now, the ETFs haven't help you offset that gap gain that happened. Whereas there's a different product called a, uh, direct Index that gets you plus or minus the same returns as the etf, but also generate capital losses for you. So you can offset these gap gains that happen. Right. And so that's kind of the arbitrage that is available is that you could invest in baskets of stocks and have these baskets of stocks return back to you a capital loss that you can accumulate. And what a lot of folks think about as, like, this is a shield against gap gains. Right. They're developing this shield, right. So that one day down the line you have this gap gain event. You're selling a bunch of stock, one of your angel investments have gone public, you're selling a house or an asset, and then you owe a bunch of taxes. And then you can apply these GAAP losses, which you can, by the way, carry forward year after year. And they don't expire. Right. You can apply them against the cap gain event that just happened.

Speaker B: Very interesting. And so that's where the joy and word of mouth comes from. It's not just buy stuff to invest in. This is actually offsetting future potential capital gains.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's so. So this product has existed for a while and actually Fidelity does have a version of this product, and Schwab does have a version of this product, and Vanguard does as well. But. But these products are mispriced in the market, in my opinion. Right. Or priced in a way that benefits those brokerages way more than it benefits the customer. Let's take Fidelity, for example. They have a product called fitfolio. You pay 0.4% for it right now, relative to, like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF Voo, which is priced at 0.03%. You're paying a 0.37% every year premium on top of the Vanguard ETF. And they're promising you that, hey, you're going to get these capital losses. Well, okay, you're going to get these capital losses for maybe 1, 2, 3, maybe 5, 10 years tops. And then your cost basis is just going to, your portfolio is just going to outgrow the cost basis. So you're not harvesting losses anymore, but you're stuck paying that 37 basis point premium forever. And so what happens is a lot of people end up leaving the Fidelity product at that point and having to self manage the stocks, which is painful. And so this is sort of what I mean about the customer experiences is not a first class problem. Um, when they're launching these products is have you thought about why this customer should be paying you 0.4%, uh, at year six, seven, eight, nine? Or do you just care about the revenue in the first five years and then let the customer be? Whereas when you price a product, product right, for us, it's a seven basis point premium on top of the three that Vanguard does. And that seven bips is well worth it. Right? You are getting maybe multiples of uh, the fees in benefits, uh, relative to the etf.

Speaker B: So I'm actually curious, how did you know that this was a problem and how did you know that you were able to solve it?

Speaker A: So I was pitched this product by a wealth manager who was helping me manage my money. And I was incredibly frustrated and confused when he called me one day when I was on holiday and told me that I must sell my ETFs and buy this thing instead. And I asked him all the questions that any reasonable person would ask. He sent me the spreadsheet and the analysis and why I should do this and sort of like, obviously, uh, he pitched the expensive fees. And I was like, wait, I'm paying three bips for Vanguard. Why should I pay 45 bips for this thing? Actually, that event ended up having both of us kind of fire each other. Like, I was like, I don't feel comfortable with this. He's like, and you're not a, and you're a horrible client. I was like, well, okay, I guess then let's just part ways. And we parted ways right then and there. But over the course of the following couple of weeks, I sort of like dug into this. And I was like, oh, okay, what he's saying does make sense. But it was pitched completely incorrectly. It was like, hey, you're going to make this like 2% per year of extra return. But you know, no one makes any extra return unless you had that cap gain that we just talked about.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Where you save real taxes. Right. Otherwise it's just something on your balance sheet. It's a cap loss, but it's not monetized. Right.

Speaker B: So this is when going to user experience. So a wealth advisor may pitch this and they even know what the hell they're doing or how they're pitching it or what even it really is.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. They're using some boilerplate one liners that they learned somewhere. And um, it's not really sort of like well understood by them in the first place or how much can I harvest in losses? And uh, how does that look like over time? And what justification this like 40B premium? Like is it justifiable? Sure, maybe next year. But what about on year five or year seven? And how do I exit out of it? And they didn't have any answers to these questions.

Speaker B: But you weren't searching for the product. There was just something that was. Well, I wasn't pushed upon you somehow. Right, like so.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: So our consumers, like the people that utilize the platform. Is this something that have a similar experience where they get, someone tries to push it on them, they don't get it and then they end up firing each other and then they find a product.

Speaker A: So there's two big segments of, I guess, archetypes of customers that come to frac. One of them, they already use this product elsewhere. Fidelity, Schwab, even like Wealthfront, Betterment, et cetera. And they're like, oh, wait a second, why am m I paying all these fees? This doesn't make any sense. Let me transition my portfolio to frec. Lower fees, better service, better product. And then the other one is like folks who literally invest in ETFs repeatedly, they're very good at doing that. They're like your classic Bogleheads. They're in vti, vx, us, et cetera. Hold on. I can construct the same portfolio that I'm constructing right now in ETFs. And this one will do the same when it comes to returns, but get me these extra credit card points. I can collect these capital losses and then one day when I sell my concentrated Nvidia stock or leave my house in the Bay Area and want to sell it and move, uh, back home or something like that, then I will use these gap losses. And so those are kind of the two types of customers that come to frack. And maybe the second segment is the One I'm more excited about because it's a massive market of folks who put in money into ETFs and thinking that ETFs are the default way to invest. And we're challenging that right now. We're like, hey, there's an evolution, right? What used to be mutual funds now became ETFs. And what are today ETFs are going to be direct indices in the future.

Speaker B: So you mentioned if we could transition back then to like you said that the founders of Instacart, you went to school with them. Was it the University of Waterloo in Canada, is that.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Very interesting because Instacart, uh, it's a Canadian grown company pretty much. Right. Wasn't it if I'm mistaken?

Speaker A: No, it started here. I mean apurva opened an office in Toronto, a development office there, uh, a couple of years later. But yeah, it started in the U.S. uh, got it.

Speaker B: And you know, I knew a lot of founders who went to University of Waterloo. That's a very high tech type school. Is that right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. They have a strong technical program.

Speaker B: So before actually creating or uh, going to, going to Twitter, you actually co founded two companies before, is that right?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was one company that we kind of like pivoted and got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was twitted.

Speaker B: Yeah. What was the company after?

Speaker C: What did it transition to?

Speaker A: So it kind of stayed within this like space of video and social media, but it transitioned into more of um, a subscription video on demand service or what we used to call svod. Like a Netflix competitor basically.

Speaker B: Got it. So was there an exit for that company? Is that how you got into Twitter or. Just curious.

Speaker A: So we, a small portion of the team went to work at Twitter. Uh, you can call it quote unquote, like small acqui hire. But um, there's a lot that I learned from that company and basically these are like I've made every single mistake in the book at uh, twittellyafter and applied all those learnings to this new one.

Speaker B: So that's great point. So what's an example of something you learned?

Speaker A: So when we first built Twitter, we basically built a feature on top of another platform. Like uh, TwittVid was built as video for Twitter right back in 2008, 2009. Twitter didn't have video, it didn't even have pictures. There was another app called Twitpick that did photos and there was Twittvid that did videos. And it turned out that that was a core feature for Twitter and that one day they would build it and they did. Right. Which kind of put a lot of pressure on us and then we kind of pivoted into something else that we wouldn't have started that if we weren't in a, sort of forced to make like a difficult pivot type decision. Right. So, yeah, like Instacart didn't do that. Right. They built a household brand, they built a standalone platform, uh, they had a direct relation with the customer and they built, ah, to sort of build their company based on that principle. And so like what we're trying to do today as well is similar to that with Frack. We have direct relationship with thousands of customers. They use us to invest, um, and manage their money in a smarter way than they could get otherwise. Had we gone down the path of working with and distributing through wealth advisors, then I would be repeating the same mistake as Twitvid. Right. The wealth advisor can decide, okay, I'm going to swap you out, I'm going to use this other service or you're not needed anymore, or put pricing pressure on us. But you know, we don't have to deal with that.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's uh, who has a relationship, right. Like Twitter had a relationship with those, with those people and you don't want to do the same thing again. Awesome. Great. So, um, do you remember, by the way, could you share like being a found being a founder of a company and you founded just your second one. There's always super high highs and super low lows. Or sometimes it could be in the same day. Do you remember any recent ones that you felt within Freck? Like do you remember super high or super low low?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I definitely remember the super high high. I don't think we've gone through a super low low yet. I think we probably will just probability wise, you know, every company does in a way, but just the time hasn't come for us yet, uh, for that one. But that super high high was, we hit $100 million in assets under management within nine months of launching, which is, uh, shocking to me. I didn't think that would happen. And again, like, no marketing. All the narrative that we heard from other founders in the space or really smart investors, uh, who I respect telling us that no, we're going to have to spend millions of dollars on marketing. None of that. We didn't do any of that. We're just word of mouth, built a great product, people loved it, told their friends about it, and we got to that number very, very, very quickly. So we celebrated as a company. Uh, that milestone was a lot of fun, but, yeah, that certainly felt really good. Yeah, we're excited for hitting a billion dollars next. That's kind of the next big milestone for us.

Speaker B: That's great. And so we talked a lot about your previous experience, your experience with Instacart and experience with previous companies and working at Twitter and then building Freck and kind of like, everything along the way. So I want to leave off on a final question. Ask everybody, um, if you could spend a day with anyone ever, whether person is currently alive or past, who would it be and why that person?

Speaker A: So, for me, I. I love, um, reading Charlie Munger's, um, just, uh, writings and listening to all his interviews. And I find that he's a very original thinker, and I like that about him. I like first principle thinkers quite a bit. Uh, I think they kind of challenge the norms. And if you could tell from my prior answer, just common wisdom doesn't always apply. And I think he's a very good figure that embodies that as well. And, uh. So, yeah, I'd love to spend some time with him. Unfortunately, he has passed away, but it would have been awesome to pick his brains.

Speaker B: Would you watch him or would you ask him any questions specifically?

Speaker A: I think there's a lot of materials out there on how he thinks about investing. I probably want to dig in a bit deeper into these questions. He's not a big fan of diversification. He calls it diversification. But does that really apply to the common investor who's busy just, you know, digging into some of these, like, geeking out with him on some of these topics?

Speaker B: Awesome. Another point I want to say. Thank you so much for your time today.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, thank you. It was really fun talking to you.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening until the end of this episode, because if it wasn't

Speaker C: for you, we wouldn't exist.

Speaker B: See you real soon.

Speaker A: It's over, johnny.

Speaker B: It's over.

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