Ignite Startups: How Adam Nash Built Daffy Into a $1B Donor-Advised Fund Platform | Ep281

Speaker A: So I got the question once. It was like, what does a CEO do? As it turns out, there's hundreds of things, and if you're doing startups, there's no job too small for you. Like, you're doing all the little things in the beginning. But, uh, my answer at that time was, you know, I, I said at the highest level, I think CEOs of startups do three things. I think they set the strategy for the company, they, they find the right people to execute on that strategy, and then they make sure that the team has the resources to execute right. At some level, if you get those three things right, you can do a hundred other things wrong and move. Uh, that probably just reflects my philosophy about how you build organizations that, you know, stand the test of time.

Speaker B: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we're delighted to have Adam Nash on the mic. He spent two decades building consumer financial products people actually use. He was VP of Product at LinkedIn through his IPO, President and CEO of Wealthfront, and VP of Product at Dropbox, with earlier stops at ebay and Apple. Since 2011, he's been one of Silicon Valley's most active angels, early in Figma, Gusto, Opendoor, Firebase and many others. In 2020, he co founded Daffy, the donor advised fund for you, which crossed a billion dollars in charitable assets in about 4 1/2 years. Pretty am. Thanks for coming on, Adam.

Speaker A: Yeah, Brian, Great to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so I, I put, uh, you on the spot before, and it said, hey, we actually know each other. I interviewed at Wealthfront 10 years ago. Didn't get the job, but I, uh, you know, had a real good time in the interview process. I remember it being like a really fun interview.

Speaker A: Well, I, I'm glad it was a good experience. I mean, Wealthfront was, uh, a very special moment. It was one of the really early companies that managed to scale in fintech. And, um, I was a big believer, I still am, that culture is so important. And so I, you know, the process of how you bring people on board I think tends to be underappreciated by a lot of operators. But it's this one window. You have to kind of introduce people to the company and culture. And you have to remember that every person you talk to, whether or not they get the job, has an impression of your company. And so you're, you know, similar to my advice on building brands and products. You know, very often people don't think enough about the people who haven't used their product yet versus their active users.

Speaker B: So yeah, and I told uh, you know, I had such a good interview experience and went on to do other things, you know, leading AI at Amazon and, and working at Microsoft. So I, it's not like I set back my career not getting the job, but I had a really good experience and I remember just telling people from then on about Wealthfront. I was like, you know, when, when people would talk about finance or investments and like, check out Wealthfront. So yeah, that, that positive experience kind of probably paid some dividends and probably got some customers from my network over, over the years.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's actually great to hear. Like I said, it was, it's one of my long standing kind of startup kind of building a brand and culture things as I always told the head of recruiting and you know, all the hiring managers that like, I want everyone leaving the company whether or not they get the job, understanding what we do and why we do it and feeling good about the company.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's amazing. It's so funny to cross paths again, but I'd love to just start with what's uh, your origin story and background.

Speaker A: Well, there's, there's a lot of versions of that. I mean I have pretty diverse interests. Although I think that if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it looks pretty standard. Uh, you know, software engineer, you know, builds a career in Silicon Valley Valley going from one tech wave to another. But you know, when you mentioned fintech and you know, financial products in general, when uh, I look at that, I mean it goes back a long ways. Uh, you know, I remember, uh, my grandmother retired while I was in college and no one ever really had taught me about money. And so I remember my first internship where I actually earned some money. I think I earned about $2,200 a month, which at the time was an unbelievable sum.

Speaker B: Yes, that's, yeah, a good. Back then, yeah.

Speaker A: And then what happened is, you know, I went through the, the fall quarter and then you know, after buying a new computer, probably for too much money and uh, you know, a little spending here and there, I realized after Thanksgiving I had less than $1,000 last. And I was like, oh my God, like I can't believe I went through all that money. And so I started on this process of learning about money. And my grandmother had just retired. She was into certificates of deposit and she was the type of person who did their taxes just with their, just pencil and paper, all the calculators by hand. She was amazingly gifted that way. And she taught, you know, uh, in school and So I started learning about mutual funds and returns and, you know, all these different things. I actually talk about her a bit. I teach this class at Stanford now, Personal Finance for Engineers. It's based on some of those learnings. But, you know, when I think about it academically, I ended up focusing my graduate school on, on human computer interaction, which is really just the study of, you know, the rational, which is computers, right ones and zeros. And, you know, we'll always do the same thing. And, and humans that, you know, you know, we have emotions, we have opinions about things. And so I just built a career that was always on this intersection of computers get more and more powerful every year. What are problems that people have that all of a sudden now computers can tackle or that people are willing to trust them with? And so that, that led me through kind of the personal computer era into, you know, web 1.0 and web 2.0 and then fintech. But the truth is, I've always cared a lot about personal finance. I think that money impacts our lives more than we like to give it credit for. Um, and I don't just mean dollars and cents of what you can afford. It's, are you happy? How do you live your life? What. What do you spend your money on? Uh, your loved ones, you know, what life do you want to build? And I think so many financial decisions end up impacting things we care about, but we don't think about it, we don't have that intentionality. And so, not surprisingly, I think that, you know, when this last fintech boom happened and I met great founders who were building companies in, I got the itch. I was an EIR at Greylock, and I remember meeting the folks at Wealthfront and going like, I think there's something special here. I think we can build something that's meaningful for people. And, you know, here we are 15 years later.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's still around, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, of course. I just saw the numbers. It's amazing to me to think that there's almost one and a half million people now who trust their finances with Wealthfront. I mean, they're almost at $100 billion. I mean, these numbers just seemed ludicrous. You have to understand that in 2012, most VCs, there wasn't even a term fintech. Um, it's one of the reasons there was an opening for me to talk to so many great founders. But, you know, that idea, most fintechs at the time had built these platforms and they managed to get people to trust them with maybe 20 million, 30 million, 40 million. They all seemed to hit a wall. They'd get these early adopters, and then they couldn't go farther. And so seeing companies like Wealthfront scale to where they are now, not just Wealthfront, Robinhood, Acorns, Coinbase and Crypto really makes me feel good about the fact that we're now using technology to help people with their money.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty amazing. What did running a company like that, that manages billions and billions of dollars of other people's dollars, uh, what did it teach you that a product, being a product exec, never could?

Speaker A: That's a good question. Uh, there's two angles to that. You know, I think that when I went to wealth from, one of the things I really believe strongly was at its heart, money is a trust business. Right. You know, like I said, money is rarely the thing that people are focused on. Like, that's not their goal in life. There are a few people who have that goal in life, but for most people, it's a means to an end. But it's a trust business and it's emotional. I believed heavily in behavioral finance, and so actually a lot of, you know, I got a Wealthfront. We were very small when I, when I went to Wealthfront, um, I'd been one of the early customers, actually. That's how they found me. But, uh, you know, I think it was about 80 million in assets at the time. But I was a very big believer in building cultures and companies that you have to build the right behaviors when you're small, because when you're big, you don't have time to write like things are locked in. And so I was always very focused on that. That was very, though kind of like building a company like a product. So I think that's a direct lesson from being a product executive as you realize that, you know, the bare bones of what you put into a product when it's early, even that mvp, are amazingly sticky and durable. And getting those bones right are really the difference between, I think, talented product designers doing that kind of zero to one problem versus the one to many. But I don't know, I loved, uh, jumping in. One of the reasons I wanted to be a CEO, um, is because I think that product strategy is only one of a handful of strategies you have to get right to build a truly great platform and organization. Right? You have the product strategy, but there's also a people strategy. Who are the right people to build and run and operate this organization? What culture do you put in place? Who do you hire? How do you train them? What are you going to reward over time? There's, um, a technology strategy, right? Like engineer, you realize that technology is continent, you know, Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, all these laws that we have about scaling and growth are a reality for the industry. And I had been at some companies that didn't do a great job of riding those next waves of technology. And so you have a technology strategy as well as a, uh, people and product strategy. And then of course, you know, being on the venture side, what's the financial strategy? Why, uh, why are investors going to fund this ride for you? Like, how are you going to. What are the proof points along the way that you will scale to get to the point where you can actually build the kind of business that will fund itself on an ongoing basis, not just for years, but for decades. So I really love jumping in to do all those things. I remember I got asked once and in all hands, you know, it's classic kind of, we were doing college recruiting, so is right I call it. I actually love it because there's always one or two folks who are not afraid to ask the hard question. And so I got the question once. It was like, what does a CEO do now?

Speaker B: What would you say your job is?

Speaker A: Yeah, actually, yeah, as it turns out, there's hundreds of things and if you're doing startups, there's, there's no job too small for you. I always look around like, you know, at some point I'm fixing the WI fi and making sure that like you're doing all the little things in the beginning. But, uh, my answer at that time was, you know, I, I said at the highest level, I think CEOs of startups do three things. I think they set the strategy for the company, they, they find the right people to execute on that strategy, and then they make sure that the team has the resources to execute right. And at some level, if you get those three things right, you can do a hundred other things wrong and move along. But, uh, that probably just reflects my philosophy about how you build organizations that, you know, stand the test of time.

Speaker B: That's amazing much wisdom. I mean, I could tug on any one of those, those sentences that you just said. But I wanted to ask, you know, you've worked a long under and alongside some famous operators. Whose playbook did you steal and who did you just, uh, deliberately throw out?

Speaker A: Well, it's interesting exactly, because I actually have seen a lot of amazing play. I mean, I started my career, I had so many internships But I started my career full time at Apple and so it's hard to. Although at the time, I will tell you, Apple was not everyone's dream comparison. I mean, there were some people who loved Apple, but this was the era of Business Week cover. Like, you know, the black cover, like the fall of an American icon or

Speaker B: the death of an American free ipod post.

Speaker A: You know, I actually had a roommate when I took the job who, who bet me that within five years Apple was going to be bankrupt. So it was. That's how dark the time was. But, uh, and then you had, you know, like companies like ebay, you know, other startups, et cetera. But you know, I think that Mostly, I mean, LinkedIn was a really formative experience for me. I mean, Reid Hoffman is really a generational strategist in a number of ways, but his intrinsic understanding of kind of network effects businesses and how you build these platforms, I think that for me, I've always looked at the way ride these waves is you're building out the core product and you're adding value to customers. But to build that business and platform, what are the seeds that you're always planting for that next wave? Where's the next 10x going to come from? Because it's never one story, right? And so much of what I learned at LinkedIn was really in direct contradiction to what I'd seen at ebay. I mean, ebay is an amazing company, a platform. I still use ebay, I still know people at ebay and, and um, I, I have so many strong feelings and positive feelings about the platform and what it enabled. But when I also look at it, I can't help it. I'm a product guy. I also think about what might have been, what could have been. And um, when I think about my time when I was at ebay, um, it was my first Internet product management role was at ebay. I'd done really computer software before at PC.

Speaker B: And they're also well known for having an amazing product. Org there at ebay, historically, especially during the time you were there.

Speaker A: That's right. It was amazing. But it was great at one thing. I would describe it as being fantastically great from an operational standpoint. I would call, you know, there's product excellence, there's operational excellence, there's service excellence. EBay's product. Org was really focused on operational excellence. Right. It. I cannot tell you how every cost, every efficiency, every developer day, um, that roadmap that went out, the prioritization, I was, as I rose in the ranks, I was on a group, a committee that every week met for hours going through over 600 different features that were prioritized based on an NPV that was uniform across the projects, dollars and cents, finance coordinated, and by the way, had a. It had a ship date on it. And I will tell you, I was there, 99% plus features met their ship date. Like if it said. If I said it was going to launch on December 12th, it was going to launch on December 12th. By every MBA standard. So I just went to a reunion. But. But by every business standard, by every operational standard was unbelievable. I mean, semiconductor companies are probably more efficiently run, but just. Just barely. It.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Uh, but then what went wrong? And to me, some of the product lessons. I talk about this when I talk about different product lessons. Where did it go wrong? Where did that operational excellence? It was wound so tight from a people standpoint and from a technology standpoint. There wasn't a lot of room for exploration and innovation, not a lot of room for riding, you know, those next technology waves. I mean, the truth is, our industry is brutal. Every five years. The reason every founder lives under the fear of, if I was starting this company today, what would I do differently? Is because every five years or so, the game really does change. Like, was the best solution is no longer the best solution. What was the right approach is no longer the right approach. And so when I look at ebay, like, they were wound so tight, it made it very difficult for them to ride the upcoming waves. I mean, you kind of saw that. And so that affected a lot of how I thought, you know, going into LinkedIn and, you know, Wealthfront, Dropbox, uh, you know, all these other companies, every company. One thing I love about Silicon Valley is that no matter how great the companies are in every wave, there's always a bunch of people who are making the list of all the things that the company did wrong and how they do it differently and saying, hey, next time we're going to do it better. Which is why, frankly, it's just a brutal industry in some ways, right? Like, this is why every five to 10 years, you know, the. The companies we previously celebrated as best in class all of a sudden are on their heels, right? You know, from the next wave of companies because of that relentless growth mindset, not just around the product and technology, but how to build better organizations, how to build better software. I mean, we're going through one right now, which is unbelievable, right?

Speaker B: So let's close the loop on wealth front to. To daffy, because I want to kind of there was a uh, like a four year period there. What are you up to? It's the late 2010s. And how did you get involved with, with Daffy?

Speaker A: Well, I mean after um, I handed off Wealthfront, uh, back to Andy, um, I ended up going to Greylock as an eir. I'd been there before. I, you know people have mixed feelings about these roles in venture capital firms and it seems like every year for

Speaker B: anybody listening doesn't know what that. What is an eir?

Speaker A: Actually that's a great question because nor it's kind of an entrepreneur in residence or in some cases an executive in residence. It can go either way. But fundamentally you're sitting there with a lot of smart people and you're meeting with a lot of founders. I'm an active angel investor, so investing as well. And actually I met a lot of great founders in that turn. I think it was in 2017 or 2018. Met the folks at Bitwise, became kind of an investor advisor there A um, number of other companies. But uh, but fundamentally it gives you time to sit there and think. You have a lot of smart people around you. You see the frameworks. When you're in an operational role, when you're building a company, you have to be heads down like you. You just don't have as much time as you'd like to look around and think hey, if I was starting with a blank sheet of paper, what would I do today? And so I spent uh, about a year, a little bit more thinking about different ideas and things to do next. Dropbox had just gone public and so I jumped in there, it was a Greylock company, jumped in there to help through on the products. I'd end up taking up growth too. I think at one point I had about 90% of the revenue rolling up to me trying to figure out what their next generation would be. But um, I just had an itch. I still working on the ideas and different companies. I had this list of ideas going back to Wealthfront days even before of great financial products that happened, haven't been reinvented yet. And actually turned out the donor advised fund was one of those products. And so I just had some trouble in the beginning thinking about how do you turn this into a venture class opportunity. But yeah, I know it sounds surprising but what happened was the pandemic happened. I had left Dropbox already to work on a startup. The pandemic happened. You know my co founder and I, we had been talking for years about doing a company together. He was one of my favorite Engineers to work with@ uh, LinkedIn back in the day.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: And um, we decided to take the leap in the middle of 2020 to actually start what is now called Daffy. So here we are five years later.

Speaker B: Amazing. And so I kind of get a donor advised fund. Dafi, tell us what that is. What is a donor advised fund? Why a startup around it? What was kind of broken there and. Yeah, tell us the whole story.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know the name you can blame me for. Yeah, you have an engineer naming things. It's going to be on the nose. I thought it was a good app name though. But the Donor advised fund for you. I really liked just the simplicity of it. And also because I was actually a true believer. I had discovered the donor advice fund before Wealth Fund actually when I was at LinkedIn, when LinkedIn went public, you know, like a lot of people all of a sudden had a lot of financial decisions to make. Made the good decision to hire a professional accountant, really talented. And one of the things he said was, you know, well, the taxes are going to be a serious issue here. Uh, you know, have you thought about charitable giving? Right, in this money? I said, well, like a lot of people, I believe in charitable giving, but I hadn't given a lot of thought to, you know, well, who would I give this much money to and how would I think about it? And LinkedIn was one of these companies where the, the lockup expired in November, so there wasn't a lot of time. And so as a result, um, he said, have you heard of a donor advised fund? Like most people, I hadn't, but he was like, you take some of the stock, you put it away, cuts your tax bill, money's invested tax free and you have time to actually figure out what your strategy is about giving. And so that really sat with me. It was, I always thought the Donor Advice one was an amazing financial product. And so the, the real insight for Daffy was just really thinking of it that way. You know, most people think of giving as something purely, uh, it's almost, I don't want to say it's cultural, but it's moral, it's ethical. We teach our children to give. Like I was raised to believe that it's not all for you, right, that, that, that some of what you earn, etc, uh, goes back to those less fortunate than yourself. And so I love working on, can

Speaker B: you just put it into a trust and give it to your family tax free?

Speaker A: And there are many options as it turns out. But no, you know, and that struck a Chord with me because I will tell you, one of the challenges in fintech all software products is that especially in the consumer space is, you know, engineers and MBAs don't have a lot in common. But one thing that they have in common, they love numbers. Very left brained, very rational. They like to go through the logic, deductive, etc. I find that the best way to design products that really stick with people, right, that are really meaningful. If you want to build a brand that touches people not just rationally, but irrationally, this is one of the things that Apple actually gets right consistently and has over decades. It's good to work in an area and go to where the heat is. What are the emotions behind it? Why do we care? I mean, our photos aren't just photos. Those are your children when they were young, right? Those are memories. That's a life lived. Uh, Apple always had a way of getting to the heart in its design culture of what really touched people. And the same thing is true in financial products. And so when I saw giving, I was like, this is actually at the heart of it. Giving is more than just a financial goal, it's not just a budget line item. And so that juxtaposition of the rational, which is, wait, you know, the average, um, 50 to 60 million American households give to charity every year. Everyone's trying to figure out how much they can afford to give, when they can give it, they're asked all the time. There's probably a lot of lessons in personal finance about how to make people more generous, how to help people with their giving, but also on the other side, how do you make it more meaningful? Why do people give? How do you touch them? Why? Look at Daffy. Some of our best feature ideas have actually come from that emotional side of really asking the question, how does giving fit in people's life? I mean, the dollars and cents are exciting and I love rolling out features, you know, where people can build portfolios and it's automatically rebalanced and it's multi custodian. All these different things that we do I think are fantastic. But a lot of things I think we got right from day one was actually just talking about the emotions, talking about why people give, why it's meaningful to them, all the different traditions around it, and then saying, hey, how do we turn this into software? How do we turn this into an app, into a product that people can use? And so anyway, I love that process.

Speaker B: So, yeah, explain how it works. Is it, basically it sounds like it almost kind of works like wealthfront for Nonprofits does like kind of what it is. Yeah.

Speaker A: The Donor Advice Fund is a really simple product, right? And so um, and most people are surprised and we can't take credit for inventing it. Donor advised funds have been around in the US for almost 100 years. I think the first one dates Back to like 1931. For most people though it became big when the giants fidelities, the Schwab's the vanguard started rolling it out in the early 90s. So it's been about 30 years. But the truth is most people haven't heard of it. Right. If you don't have a high end wealth manager, um, financial advisor or an accountant, um, you probably hadn't heard of it. But the Donor Advised fund is almost exactly what you want, right? You know, so giving is two hard problems, right? How much can I afford to give and then who do I give it to? The Donor Advised fund is kind of like a 401k for charity. It says, okay, you know, that you give regularly, right. Put money aside when it's convenient for you in this special account you get the tax deduction right away for, for giving money to charity. The money's invested tax free. And then whenever you're inspired to give, you just name the charity and the Donor advised fund, you know, sends the money off.

Speaker B: So yeah, it's like basically like ah, like an IRA for giving.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's like an IRA for giving. Some people in the tech industry think. I think of it more as like a wallet for charity. You can, you can think of it as a number of different ways, but it turns out intermediation has this value, right? And the value of charitable giving is really large because very often the times where you have the inclination to put money aside for charity as a budgeting kind of financial goal is different than when someone comes and asks you to help. Right? An organization, a cause, uh, yeah, a crisis. And so I just, this is my product perspective. But just you know, it turns out when you have two hard problems, it's like N squared hard. Right? And so a lot of making great products simple is just separating out problems so that you can tackle them one by one, right? Like not, you don't, you don't bombard the user with all the things they have to figure out at once. Like you, it's a journey right through the product and learning. And so I think donor advised funds do the same thing for charitable giving for millions of people. And so the space has been growing rapidly but no one had really taken the approach of Saying, how do we turn this into a great product? Most of the incumbents just treat it as an attach rate feature for, um, their advisory platform.

Speaker B: Just another account with, with stocks and bonds in it. Right?

Speaker A: It's just another account. Right. And so they have, you know, individual, they have joint. Yes, you can have stocks and bonds and funds. It's kind of like a 401k. They have pools, but they're surprisingly not built for giving. And by the way, I don't fault the incumbents for this. It's not their business model. They, they all picked a business model. They borrowed from their investment side where they charge a percentage of assets, which by the way, is a great business model for some businesses. As you mentioned, Wealthfront uses that business model. But it turns out that the problem with that business model for giving is really that money is very nonlinear. Right. You know, we all know. And so if you make money, it turns out the work you have to do for a billion dollar account isn't 1,000 times more than a million dollar account, let alone $1,000 account. I mean, the average American gives, you're talking about a few hundred dollars, a few thousand dollars a year to a handful of charities. And so I really thought that that was the opening to build a great product, not just for the ultra wealthy, but for everyone, for those 50 to 60 million American households who give to charity every year. And it felt like the Donor Advised Fund. When you're building a financial product, I think the regulatory framework is incredibly important. We weren't going to invent a new account for this. The Donor Advised Fund was already there. And so, I mean, in some ways you stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, that a lot of people came up with the Donor Advised Fund, figured out what you could do with it. I think we just took it into the 21st century, you know, I mean, when we launched Dafi, there wasn't even a fully functional Donor Advised Fund in the app store in 2021, you know, and so, um, we launched mobile first. We launched with support for things like crypto that most of the incumbents didn't support. And the biggest difference is we launched with a, uh, really unique business model where instead of charging a percentage of assets like a lot of nonprofits, we just charge a membership fee.

Speaker B: It's fascinating. So, uh, let's talk a little bit about. There wasn't a lot of product innovation to be done. It sounds like on the account creation side, maybe a little bit on the invest investments, like where, where the money goes while it's waiting to be donated. But you said you, you innovated a lot on the product side, on, on the giving. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, well, you know, you have to be uh, this industry is humbling. Always being, being a product leader is always humbling because you're, you're lucky if you're half right. You have a bunch of ideas. I used to joke that you have 10 good ideas and winning that to the great ones that actually work in the market that you ship and then you're lucky if it's, it's one or two out of ten. That's why you have to iterate. That's why you have to do you

Speaker B: have a, a uh, story about that where you built something over your career and you were just so excited about it, but nobody like it just flopped.

Speaker A: I mean so many great features and I just, I like to think in some cases they were just early because timing actually matters. But, but in many cases, um, there's so many pieces. Actually some of my reason I became known as a growth guy. Right like, you know, right. LinkedIn was that generation of companies. Web 2.0, LinkedIn, Facebook, they were the first companies to have a growth team instead of just marketing for user acquisition,

Speaker B: which became very sophisticated over time. So some of the LinkedIn growth stuff is just outstanding.

Speaker A: Well, and we had to figure it out. But we had to figure it out. When I think of all the features, like growth is one of those areas where you have to get comfortable with most of your feature ideas not working. And some of them are very counterintuitive, um, when you roll them out. But uh, no, like when I think of Daffy and I think of the things that we've iterated on, it actually turned out what we were wrong about was, um, actually was very funny. I thought this was a market expanding product. I thought when we launched the mvp, I was very much like, yeah, the wealthy people who have financial advisors and are using the incumbents, we're not for them. We're for the other 50 million Americans who, who just want to put aside $10 a week, $25 a month. They give a few hundred dollars to charity. It's meaningful and we could build a great app for that. I'd been on the board of a company called Acorns. Acorns has millions of customers now who use Acorns to help them lead better financial lives. And just off a few dollars a month. And then of course we launch the product and immediately within the first few Days we get this request, can I move money from my existing donor advised fund? We hadn't built it, we didn't even know if it was possible. We go into this crash sprint to figure out how to do that. Good news is it's not very hard to do and we actually shipped it within a couple weeks. So we got it out there. But you know, the truth is the last four years this space is so open, there's been so little innovation at scale. Um, we kind of have been running the table. I mean every year we, we've rolled out easily four to six meaningful, I think innovations. I mean, I'll give an example, but this will sound trivial to you and for most people in tech, but it turns out, you know, everyone in the charitable space knows that it's about families and giving. If you talk to the Morgan Stanley's and Goldman Sachs of the world, they'll talk about multi generational giving, they'll talk about wealth transfer, they'll talk about legacy, all these incredible things. And yet every donor advised fund out there is like, do you want an individual or joint account? Right. And so what tech product these days doesn't have a family plan? I mean, I'm sorry, I'm a father of four. I, I feel like I have a lot of these like Netflix, Apple, Xbox.

Speaker B: I mean, I have three kids myself, so yeah, I can relate.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so we said, why, why wouldn't you build that into giving? So we added the ability of family product. You can add up to actually 24 different people to your daffy plan. And you as the organizer, you funding the account, you, you still control it fundamentally. You know, you can have siblings, you can have parents, grandparents, giant groups. Maybe it's an honor of someone else. Um, I have all four of my children on the account and it's fantastic. When I, my wife and I make a donation, it becomes a subject of dinner conversation, right? Something to talk about, to teach them. And then my children can actually make recommendations. In the end, my wife and I can either approve those or reject them or modify them. It's kind of like Amazon requests. But um, I know this sounds obvious, right? Like you look at it and you go, why doesn't everyone else have it? But those are famous last words. It just comes from the perspective. Uh, you know, we've rolled out APIs, we've rolled out custom portfolios, we've rolled out support for private stock. I mentioned crypto before. You know, all these different features, but every one of them came from the same place, which is Just looking at our members, listening, uh, to them, thinking about why they give what was meaningful to them and saying, hey, you know, in the modern world, like, how would you turn this into a feature? Like how would you build that into the product rather than have it be something that people do on their own? I always like to make products a little bit more than just a tool. Right.

Speaker B: They are tools.

Speaker A: But, but fundamentally I like to think about the entire experience that people have around using them. It was one of the things I learned the hard way, uh, at ebay, you know, in the early days for web one. Oh, so many web products in the beginning were so focused on the one task they did, they didn't really think about the broader set of tasks, what the, what the user was actually trying to get done. So, and we've just been, like I said, it's uh, it's been a lot of fun.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Innovating in a space where you feel like when you do something right, it encourages more generosity. I mean that's the mission of the whole organization, is to help people be more generous more often.

Speaker B: Amazing. So there's been some contrarian takes online that ah, you know, donor advised funds get attacked as warehouses where, uh, rich people park their money and never give it away. Uh, steel man, that argument. And then tell me where they're wrong.

Speaker A: Well, I think, you know, I think where it comes from is just this current fixation on billionaires. I mean, I don't even know if people really focused on what that word means and the number of people involved, et cetera. But you know, you find out that Peter Thiel has billions in his Roth IRA and then everyone wants to change policies around IRAs and that sort of thing. But you know, to steal my argument, it's like it's technically possible, right? Like you can put a lot of assets into a donor advised fund and

Speaker B: have it come a half million into

Speaker A: the next years and decades. And so I can totally understand why some people say, hey, that feels like a hole in the system, we should plug it for billionaires. And then my argument against it really is twofold. I mean, the first and foremost, I would say, like, listen, you may have opinions about what you can and can't do with an ira, but let's not forget that for tens of millions of Americans, that's an important part of their retirement savings and their goals. They're not billionaires and so do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. So, so if you're going to have a regulation around that and you want to cap it at some certain level, or if you want to have restrictions once it gets to a certain size, willing to listen, like that makes sense. But most people don't put away billions. They don't have the capacity to do it right. Uh, uh, you know, most people, they're giving to their kids, school, they're giving to a religious organization they belong to, they're giving to a cause. They're not, they're not trying to squirrel away money forever. And so I really do, like, encourage people to focus on the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans who need a better system for how they give. But the second thing, the argument I have is that the data just doesn't support it. I mean, they run this data every year. I mean, I know everyone's worried. Well, foundations have this requirement to give away 5% their assets every year. Endowments have rules about how much they have to put through their cause. But every number, every year I've ever seen for donor advised funds shows that the number is much, much higher.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I think last year in the industry was something like 24%. That maybe that's a 2024 number. I'm not sure. I don't get it. Right. But, but fundamentally, I, um, mean, at daffy, it's over 50%.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Um, right. In terms of if you how much money people put aside in year one and then the next year, how much of that goes out the door to charities? 55% was our number from 2025. And so I just think when I look at policy problems, I'm saying, like, what problem are you actually solving here? Right. You know, and so, um, I would be asking more questions personally about foundations and endowments and what they're doing. But I think that the secret actually just turns out that, um, we get distracted by the ultra wealthy. It's like celebrity fascination for most people. Giving matters to them. But we are all busy. We have work, we have home life, we have family, we have social life. We have so many things going on. The truth is, is that giving is one of those tasks that isn't a daily task for most people. And so what happens is when someone asks you to give, right? An organization, you end up in this problem where you didn't budget for it. You don't know how much you can give. You're thinking, like, wait, this month you're trying to do this math in your head. How much can I afford to give? What's the right amount? And then, then you have this question of, is this the organization I want to give it to is this the right thing to do? And it's just too hard. And so what ends up happening is a lot of people don't give as much as they want to. I know that sounds funny, but if you talk to a lot of people, generosity, giving is one of the things that people feel good about. They feel good about the organizations they support, the causes they belong to, what it says about them, what it says to their family, uh, and the difference that they're making. And so I just happen to be a believer that having separate accounts, I mean, I teach this class, like I said, on personal finance.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to ask about that.

Speaker A: Mental accounting is a real thing. Goal setting is a real thing. There is research that says that if you set a goal pre commitment for your giving, you give 32% more.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Uh, I believe, uh, that it's true, but it's true for all financial tasks. I mean, how many of us would put money away for retirement reliably if it didn't just come out of the paycheck? I mean that's why automatically, that's why these things make sense. That's why financial advisors will talk to their clients about their goals for retirement and then turn that into a number, a savings goal, et cetera. All these things work. So I think that, you know, for folks, um, who get fascinated with donor advise funds, et cetera, I always encourage them to think of what actually the average use case is and not just think about, you know, what you read about, whatever billionaire you're worried about right now is doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's amazing. Are you still teaching personal finance for engineers at Stanford?

Speaker A: I am. I actually just confirmed It'll be the 10th year this year. Wow, it's amazing. Uh, it's been that long. But yeah, it's a dream thing for me because, well, I love to teach. I obviously care about the topic, but it also happens to be one of the misses I felt when I was at Stanford was, uh, that they didn't teach this class. I mean so many students at Stanford are the first in their family to go to college or if they're not, you know, they, they feel like they, they got the golden ticket. They just don't want to mess it up. And the truth is when I went to school, there weren't classes. I actually think it should be taught in middle school, in high school. I've actually open sourced all the material. It's actually available a free blog. I've actually had a number of schools at all different levels, even internationally, ask if they can use the material and it's great. For me, that's the reward.

Speaker B: I'll walk through it with my teenage boys. I think that's a good idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, I'm a big believer in that, you know, with my own children as well. Uh, I think that for some reason, especially in the United States, we're incredibly uncomfortable talking about money and about how it affects people's lives and how we make decisions. You know, we'll go to the store with our children and, you know, they'll want to buy something. And the reality is it's not in the budget. But we don't want to say that to our children and we don't want to burden them with thinking too much about money and life, et cetera. And so we tend to make up other reasons. Right, like, oh, that's not that, or you know, that we'll talk about anything else. And I happen to be in the school of thought that says that, you know, this is, when you do that, you know, children figure it out, right? There's something you're not talking about. And so a lot of people, what they know about money is just what they picked up from. It's funny, it's the same thing with careers. At, uh, LinkedIn. I used to say that step one for most children is kind of the friends of your parents and the parents of your friends tend to be the adults, you know, and so your worldview tends to be very narrow because it's, it's basically based on that. And so I really think that's where education comes in to open, you know, kids minds and to help people navigate their lives. So by college, I mean students really need it. I'm not talking about fancy stuff. I'm not talking about portfolio theory or, you know, calculate returns. I'm talking about the basics of what financial products are, what problems they solve and you know, how do you lead a healthy financial life? Like, I think that these are things that actually everyone needs to learn from someone at some point.

Speaker B: I mean, I grew up poor and uh, on welfare. And that's uh, why I got a finance degree, frankly. I mean, I was getting a history major up in, up in Washington state where I'm from, and that got really boring. And I was like, I better learn how to like money work. So I went and got a finance degree. It was interesting. I'm decent at math. I like the, you know, the numbers of it and stuff. And ended up working on Wall street and hating that. And now I'm a VC which is very random but kind of full circle. But you know, like, that's why I got a degree in finance. I just wanted to understand how it all works, you know, from the inside.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think a lot of us who love the field get into it that way. Right. We had, like I said, I had my own stories, et cetera, but this desire of how does this work? How do you make good decisions? Um, I want to understand this and for some people I want to be good at it. I think are really natural. I mean it turns out that in our economy and in our society, you know, like I said, money is not necessarily the goal that most people have. But wow, does it turn out that if you don't understand how it works, the basics.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It can really get in the way of some of the goals that we have that are the most important to us.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, speaking of money, you've angel invested in 90 plus companies, some really amazing ones like Figma, Gusto, Opendoor, Firebase and many others. So you're like a prolific angel. This is very much a startup and VC podcast and I love to learn from really great angels like you. So what is a pattern that you look for when you make an investment?

Speaker A: Well, I appreciate, although almost I think at this point, uh, I've been angel investing almost 14 or 15 years. I think I'm up to about 160, 170 companies because I have a model, one of the things I learned. So my angel investing is kind of an interesting combination. Of course being an operator and knowing something about what I know and what I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And having a little humility around that,

Speaker B: uh, and create great organizations and.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But then also having spent a couple tours of duty at uh, ah, some great venture firms, understanding how professional venture capitalists really think of it, what it takes to run a fund and a firm like Greylock really helps you so the system. So as an angel investor I'm probably not as sexy or cool as, you know, folks who kind of have the inspiration, et cetera. I, I actually run it a little bit like venture. I even break my angel every three years into what I call a fund that I track. But you know, I actually, not surprisingly, I treat it as a little bit of a personal finance. I'm tact. There's a certain amount of money I feel like I can afford in my broader portfolio to invest in new startups

Speaker B: every year just out of curiosity for LPs listening when they're thinking about investing in venture funds and angel investments in SPBs, like just, you know, what, what is that percentage of your wealth that you feel comfortable every year putting towards that asset?

Speaker A: Uh, they're not going to love this answer, but I'm happy to give it. But they're not going to love it. There's some people who do their angel out of income, basically. I never approached it that way. I think that's valid, but I don't approach it that way. I always treat it a little bit more as a portfolio problem. So I basically said that I can afford to have about 10% or so of my savings, of my assets.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so this is the part they're not going to like. We all know it takes about 10 years. I do seed stage. It takes about 10 years.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: For the best companies to get from there to any form of liquidity. And this is why I see a lot of angels getting wrong. I've actually written about this that you see a lot of angels so excited, they jump into it, they invest year one in a bunch of companies, year two, and then they realize year three that like, wow, that's a lot of money out there. And none of it's coming back.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Am I really going to.

Speaker B: Some of them are shutting down, by the way too.

Speaker A: Right. I'm a gardener too, so this expression actually bothers me because it's not true. But the VCs always say the lemons ripen early type of thing. And so you tend to see some, the failures a little bit more, the ones that don't make it a little faster than the ones that make it.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And maybe not an AI four or

Speaker B: five years to raise their A right from a seed, Right?

Speaker A: That's right. They look like failure.

Speaker B: Figma very famously was, I think four years, five years between their cdna, something like that.

Speaker A: It was, I think it was the A to the B. But, uh, you're right, it's. I mean, but that's a great example. So Figma, I did the seed I walked around Palo Alto with, with Dylan in 2013 and you know, pinged him afterward and you know, and he let me put a small check into it and. But when did Figma go public? Right. 20, 25.

Speaker B: Yeah. 12 years later.

Speaker A: Right. And so, so what I did was I, I figured out what percent of my portfolio I could afford to have in angel investments. I divided that by 10 and then I decided what my check size roughly was with the idea that I had to be able to invest in about four to six companies a year. I'm not perfect, as you know. It turns out I'm human and emotions run hot. And so when I look at my angel now, over 14 or 15 years, I see, like, yeah, in the years where things are running a little hot, maybe I did more like 10 to 12 investments. I think there was one year where I may have gotten closer to 20. You know, in the years where I'm super busy as an operator, did fewer. It's actually funny. Some of my best investments were in those years that I did fewer. There was one year, I think I only did six, five or six investments. But one of them, I think it was 2013, I think. I think. I think that's where Figma and Gusto and Opendoor all were living either 2013 or 2014.

Speaker B: That's really good vintage, as they say in the industry.

Speaker A: Yeah. So. But, you know, and you have to learn. And so what do I look for? Um, I look for a few things. Um, believe it or not, I'm actually a big believer in, uh. So one is when I talk to folks, I try to stick to my knitting. Right. There are areas where I have expertise, where I know things. I'm still a big believer that I need to understand why the founder's talking to me. If the reason is just money, that's not a great answer. You know, there are people with more money than me, that sort of thing. I hate to say it, but it's a little bit like, you know, if you don't know who the sucker at the poker table is, you're the. You're the sucker. So I. I like when people come to their third where they want a, uh, product executive, you know, someone with real experience. Maybe it's in social, maybe it's in fintech or marketplaces or one of the areas. I have direct experience.

Speaker B: You can.

Speaker A: I do want to know the money.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It has to make sense to me why they're talking to me. I listened to the founder. One of the hard lessons I learned early on the venture side was it's not your company. One of the big mistakes operators make as investors is they keep thinking about what they would do if they were running the company. It's not your company. You're not going to be there to run it. As a small investor, like an angel. You're not even on the board. You don't even know what they're going to be doing. So you need to actually take yourself out of it enough to just hear what they think they're doing. And then for me, I need to hear not just the product value that it adds, but also the distribution strategy. How are they going to reach people? How are they going to get to venture scale? And then lastly, and this sounds funny, but there's a little bit of founder market fit for me, which some people like that term, some people don't. But for me they're the founders who, who think they found a great way to make money. And I do not begrudge them because that, that is definitely one of the ways to build a business. You find a hole in the market, you think a business. I happen to be of the point of view that building startups, especially venture backed technology startups, a decade at least, the best founders are involved even longer. They have to really almost irrationally care about the space. Yeah, it's like a founder market.

Speaker B: Why fit?

Speaker A: Yeah, so it doesn't work for me if it. And I've met, by the way, I've passed on companies that uh, turned out to be amazingly valuable, um, because I wasn't sure the dedication of the founder.

Speaker B: What is your anti. I want to hear Adam Nash's uh, anti portfolio. What's that check that you didn't write that still keeps you up at night?

Speaker A: Sorry? Well, none of them keep me up at night. I learned that very early. There's always gonna be more out there. The companies you didn't see, the, the folks that you missed. I mean, I have just from a personal operating standpoint, like, forget investing. I mean like, you know, everyone who came up in the 90s has this list of like when they could have gone to. I could have been like the fifth engineer at Yahoo or you know, early at Google. I mean I had so many friends who went, all these companies, you have to tune all that noise out. But fundamentally I think that venture is filled with so many paradoxes. I wrote this one post years ago and it reflected on something I'd learned at business school for a totally different reason. I had to do with business and government. But I saw the same pattern in venture, which is that, uh, one of the fundamental paradoxes in venture is that in venture, when you're new, it's so easy to sound smart by saying no, right? In fact, venture firms push this on associates, junior folks in the firm, right? They come in, your bar's not high enough, right? There's a litany of reasons why this won't work. And by the way, they're right. There's always a litany of reasons why it won't work.

Speaker B: You could always, always say no. It's easy to say, like it's easy to find a reason to say no.

Speaker A: Yeah, but it's rewarded. You sound smart. By saying no in the short term. But in the long term people only care about when you said yes. Right. And just living in that paradox, you know, and so. But the joy, like I could have

Speaker B: said no to tons of companies doesn't matter. But the fact that I said yes to Google in 1997 at a 5 cap and put a little 25k check in makes me a legendary Ron Conway level investor for all time. Nobody cares that ron Conway wrote 300 other checks in that fund.

Speaker A: That's right. I mean that's a power law, right? Like et cetera. But so what happens is I think you have to always be looking back at your own foibles and mistakes, idiosyncrasies. I'm very people driven. So in general I tend to invest in people who've worked with me. For me. That impressed me. I think that's one of the ways it also answers the question, why are they coming to you? Right? They know you, they trust you. I mean the reason Dylan Field came to talk to me was not because I was an angel, actually at the time I had barely done a half dozen investments. It's because I was the VP of product when he was an intern at LinkedIn. Right. He was, he had, he wanted some advice. So I walked around and then of course, what I had learned on the venture side is no, if you want to invest, you know, actually say so. Right. And, and by the way, the original idea that Dylan had, I had some real problems with. I was not convinced it was going to work. It was like a photo editing thing in the cloud. It was not right. But what I realize now, and that I look for more because of Dylan, is that some of my best investments came because I like to think of myself as a smart person, a connected person. I know what's going on to some level. I mean, not perfect, but you're more than most, better than then quite a few. So I'm always impressed when I meet someone young who's been diving into space where I thought something and they convinced me that I was wrong.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Right. And all of a sudden I go, so I remember walking around in Palo Alto, Dylan, and he talked about, I had this thesis that said, hey, what was going on with social and mobile was that we'd finally got enough distance from the PC era, like 30 years that we were just going to do it again. We were going to reinvent everything that we had done in the PC era, except for social and mobile. And so if you look back at the PC era, we started with productivity, Word processing, spreadsheets were the first things that came out that were actually real utility. Then we went to graphic design, art, desktop publishing, you know, you know, graphics, et cetera. And then later, then we went to fintech, the quickens of the world, et cetera. Like, so I, in my head, I was looking for these investments and of course with Wealthfront, I was jumping in myself to the third phase because ahead of the curve. But you know, I was talking to Dylan, I was like, oh, I love this because I think it's happened. But I told him, I said, I think it's going to take a while because of, uh, all the things that are going to move to the cloud. Graphics feels like a very late thing. This is an area where people will still spend $10,000 on a machine that has beefy graphics cards, right?

Speaker B: In a way, because it did take them almost the rest of the decade to really.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was convinced. Yeah, I was convinced. Like, uh, you know, I was like, people don't, great designs at the time, like wouldn't even use laptops. They needed a, a beefy machine to kind of do it. And he said, no, I think that's complete opposite. Those GPUs are sitting idle most of the day in the cloud. You can have a cluster can be used. And by the way, I can put enough hardware in the cloud that you would never pay for that yourself. You will just rent it and bandwidth has gotten high enough and latency low enough that I'll just send the pixels for the screen over to you. And he was very big on WebGL. He's like, now's the time. Like, we can build this and, uh, we can timeframes, uh, totally fair. But I remember thinking, I was just talking to him going like, you're totally right. I had already moved, by the way, at LinkedIn, I was using desktop PCs, just remote, you know, Windows sharing in, desktop sharing in. Because that way I could have the PC at work and free travel, laptop. I was like, yeah, it totally works. The market's gonna get there. And I know that sounds trivial and it wasn't the heart of the right thesis, um, but that pattern with founders, I think that if you have the right mentality, meeting great founders when they tell you something, when you learn something and you feel like you're plugged in. For me at least, I was like, wow, this is. Well, it's either wrong, it can be, or it's ahead of the market. And so I love it turns out that some of my most successful investments have been along that line. I mean Gusto was very much it was zen payroll at the time, but was very much this. This idea that actually the user experience mattered. Josh, Tomer, Eric, they were all very passionate about this idea that actually payroll mattered. That actually this is expand. Like people care about how they're paid and yet the platforms are all horrible. They don't keep the experience. And this idea of like what's one of the first things you do at a company ironically is set up your pay. And I remember this when I was first getting a job at Apple and that sort of thing. And I know it sounds crazy, but they were believed that like small businesses, huge number in the US no one was taking care of them and that it was possible now online to acquire, to actually find those small businesses and give them a solution that was not just 10x but 100x better than what they had access to. So I don't know, like uh, if you had asked me before I met them, I would have said there is no reason that that should work. A small business products that tortured area venture capital. There were so many tenured venture capitalists who refused to invest in anything tied to small business just because of how hard the go to market was. But they were the ones who said no. Actually, I think with online social acquisition, I think it's changed. I think you can find small business owners the same way you find consumers. And frankly, having built out LinkedIn, I was like no, you're right. Like actually LinkedIn is pretty good for fighting small business owners, et cetera. It's becoming a solved problem.

Speaker B: Well Adam, I feel like I could talk to you for another hour or two about all this stuff, but I know you gotta run. Where can folks find you online?

Speaker A: I lack some. We already talked about Daffy. So when it comes to naming, it turns out my handle is Adam Nash on pretty much all the platforms. But you, um, can find me on X Adam Nash, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Adam Nash. Uh, and of course at Daffy on the blog there, you know, I try to write regularly about giving and financial topics, etc. I would highly encourage everyone to check out Daffy.org I don't think Daffy is for people who don't give to charity. Like if you don't give to charity, I don't think we're going to convert you into the type of person who does. But if you, if you support your kids school, if you belong to a religious institution. If you give regularly to national or, or global causes, try the product. It's free to get started. Put a little money in there. I think what you're going to find is that having a separate account for charity means.

Speaker B: I think it's more like an hsa.

Speaker A: You know, it's funny. Um, it is, it is like an HSA for giving. Yeah, yeah. It's, it all comes down to the same thing. Having a separate account means that when someone asks you to give, you no longer have to reach in your pocket and debate. You can just literally open your phone, tap, tap, tap.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if you're inspired to give card

Speaker B: right to my Apple Pay, you know, Google Wallet or whatever, and just, and just pay for it with, with the, uh, funds I have set aside.

Speaker A: Funny you mentioned that. We haven't solved that problem yet, but it's on the list.

Speaker B: Okay. That's on the roadmap.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, I expect it 99% on time. You know, as somebody who, who lived that at ebay.

Speaker A: So we're, we're, we're free now. We, we, uh, we love iterating. Some of our best feature ideas are things where we didn't plan them. One member comment comes in one inspiration saying, why can't we do this for giving? And then a week or two later, we get it out the door.

Speaker B: Just get. Yeah, just go for it. Yeah. I mean, I, I used hsa. We, we max it out every year, and then every once in a while we'll be like, oh, there's like five grand sitting there. Let's withdraw it and send all the receipts in and, you know, and every once in a while we'll pull out the card for at the dentist or the doctor's office. So. Yeah, I think that would make sense.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's. Our members actually are delighted by it. There's something that feels really good when you get asked to give and you actually care and you want to support. You want to support your friend, colleague, the organization, et cetera. When you open up that app and you discover actually you do have the money.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's literally for nothing else. You cannot use it for anything but giving to charity. It feels so good to be able to do it when you want to do it. It's hard to express that freedom. That's why I encourage everyone just to try it. Well, we see this.

Speaker B: Miles. Could I, like, donate Miles into an account like that? Have you looked into that?

Speaker A: It's funny, we've gotten that request just recently. Ah, a little bit of, like, are there other ways that I can fund this account?

Speaker B: Right. There's some monetary value there. If I have a hundred thousand miles in Southwest or something, maybe I could donate that. Uh, we have a startup that helps. It's a platform for that. So. So we'll talk after the. After the recording.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: All right, awesome. Thanks so much, Adam.

Speaker A: Cool. Thank you again.