The AI Tax Firm Challenging How Americans Use Money

Opto: Hello, everyone. Today we're joined by Ben Borodach co-founder and CEO of April. April is an AI-powered tax platform that helps financial companies offer embedded tax filing. planning and estimation tools directly within their own products.

The company has got a strong position around making tax more integrated, personalized and useful year round, not just during filing season. Ben came to the business after starting his career at Deloitte and later building FinTech and cyber security ventures. How are doing today, Ben? Ben: I'm doing well, thanks so much for having me on the show.

Opto: No worries. are you calling from New York? that where April is based? Ben: Yes, I'm in our headquarters in New York City on 27th and Broadway.

Opto: Awesome, I'm up on Upper West Side. I've been here for the last six months, and I'm not too far away. ⁓ Yes, I thought we could start. I mean, I a brief intro on April, but it'd good to hear from your point of view.

What is April for someone who's never heard of it before? What does the company do? Ben: Amazing. Absolutely.

So we started the company about five years ago with this grand vision to embed tax in every financial decision. Tax is the largest expense most Americans have throughout the year. We pay several trillion dollars to the U.S.

government and to many of the states that need that money in order to function. And it's not not only is it not well understood, but it's also a massive driver of the household P &L and also the household bottom line financial outcomes. And today what's happened is that that activity, which as you pointed out in the introduction, is not just a compliance activity that needs to happen once a year. It's actually an ongoing activity, whether those are credits or those retirement planning or withholding optimization, or thinking about saving for your children's future and your estate.

That affects many elements of an American household's life. And right now it's just not available. It's either in some accountants inbox or it's in TurboTax or H &R Block. And it's unavailable.

The information and the decision making are unavailable at the places where Americans are banking, where they're managing their money, where they're being paid. And so April's idea is to take this concept called the tax engine, of which we are about one in 12 that exist in the country, one in 12 companies that have a chartered tax engine. meaning we've gone through the federal and state approval processes that say this is actually accurate and we actually have the permission to send tax returns to them, of which we did about 1.

4 million federal and state tax returns this year, how can we bring all of that to the places where Americans are making these decisions? And so in order to do that, we developed ⁓ the most, our mission is to develop the world's most connected tax software. And so that's how we differentiate between the monoliths. that have existed and dominated the industry for 40 or 50 years that were built before cloud, before mobile, certainly before AI.

They're all trying to reinvent themselves now, but the reality is they have code bases and infrastructure that is just decades old. They hardly have APIs. so forget talking about something like an MCP. And so for us, ⁓ being now in this very intimate group, we're now this tax season, probably the eighth largest online tax provider, which you can't even sign up for.

because we're only available through our partners. And so the idea is to really change the relationship that Americans and small businesses have with their taxes by engaging directly with their chosen financial institution. Opto: Can you tell us more about how you think, most people think about tax once a year and how you think about it differently and what that actually means to people? Ben: Yeah, so let's take a few examples, right?

Let's start with two simple examples. So let's say you started a small business, great. ⁓ You now make income every day and you are actually responsible for calculating and paying those taxes to the IRS and the state on an ongoing basis. And if you don't do that, you get late fees and penalties.

If you are an employee, you are supposed to be withholding through this thing called a W-4 form, but most Americans don't. fill it out once, they forget about it, their income changes, they have a capital sale, and then they forget about it and they end up with the same problem. And then they don't set enough money aside at the end of the year to pay the IRS or they end up with this like large tax refund, which is kind of a waste. They could have invested it or used it for some other purpose in their life.

And so I think at a most fundamental level, like most Americans either are paid through W-2 or have some kind of small business. Those are the two backbones of the American economy. And just right there, this is not nearly optimized or well managed for the majority of households. And so when you start to step up into Americans that are approaching retirement and might be doing what's called a Roth conversion, where they need to do that analysis and need to make a very large estimated tax payment.

You have Americans that are earning RSUs as part of their compensation package and are unsure how much they should be selling, how they should be thinking about that money, how much they should be setting aside. And so as you just peel back the onion, What you realize is that financial advisory platforms, digital platforms, banking platforms are ill-equipped. They want to manage money. They want to help Americans, you know, better save for their future.

But something that has a massive effect on those dollars is just someone else's problem. And the person whose problem it is, it's not really what they do. It's not really accountants today and sort of digital filing solutions are not there to help you make better financial decisions. They were set up to help make a compliance activity possible at an affordable price point.

And we can argue if that price point is too expensive or if that experience can be improved. But regardless of that equation, it's all actually peanuts relative to the opportunity to actually help someone at the point of financial decision. Opto: And what made you make the decision to work with partners rather than going straight to their end user? Ben: Right, so I was at a venture fund called Team8.

I was working with ⁓ my sort of silent business partner, Ronen, who co-founded a company called eToro that he took public last year, kind of the international Robinhood. And we were working with some other smart folks at Euclidean Capital, which is the Jim Simons family office, and trying to think about the future of financial services. And ⁓ what kind of appeared to us back in 2020 is that this was kind of at the time where everybody was starting a neo bank. And we said, that's not really that interesting.

Kind of, if you look actually at financial services, it used to be that offering financial services were difficult because they were highly regulated. That's still true. But the reality is you now have banking as a service, you have investing as a service, you have payments as a service. Getting the regulatory rails, it's still difficult, but it's not nearly as hard as it was 15 and 20 years ago and certainly beyond that.

And so you're moving to a world where actually getting a debit card or a payment product or even investing product is much less difficult. Maybe not having the best one, but having one is much less difficult than it was a decade ago. And I think in the last 15 years, what you've had is an explosion of apps, right? We had Venmo and Robinhood.

And so it's like everyone had their app to shore to be able to do these new, innovative things as we brought payments and investing and crypto and all these great capabilities to the American economy and the American household. What we didn't do in that process or what happened as a by-product is people's financial lives ended up all over the internet. I have a banker, I have this financial advisor I inherited. use this money app.

I'm buying crypto over here. I've got this other thing to manage my small business. My kids on this app, my spouse is on that app. And suddenly you're like, how am I making financial decisions?

I'm actually now responsible for this. And I've got this information all over the internet. and, and so I think the future that we imagined before AI kind of really went mainstream was that these digital platforms that are kind of one too many. where everybody kind of gets the same blunt basic service are actually going to become, you know, hyper personalized.

And so if you look at a lot of the transformation that's happened in vertical software, where you now have these apps that are serving barbershops or construction companies, right. It's like, why does that exist? It's you actually have these massive populations of people or businesses that all kind of look the same and are not well served by these mainstream applications. And I think if you look at where this is going, everybody is gonna expect a personalized service.

And I played this, was ⁓ talking to a very, large executive, an executive at one of the largest credit card companies, okay, top three. And his company was the first credit card that I had ⁓ when I graduated school. You could probably guess a little bit which one it might be. Opto: and Ben: And they were telling me, look, we have the best data on our customer.

We know our customer better than everybody else. And I said, that's interesting. ⁓ because I had your credit card and now I, I mainly bank with chase and visa, ⁓ sorry, chase and AMEX. ⁓ and I actually, this would have been useful if LLMs really were mainstream at the time, but I actually pulled out some of the emails that his company had been sending me over the course of my maturation.

And it was like, I had a kid. They sent me, you know, 10 % off at Best Buy. I got a promotion. They sent me 5 % off at some random restaurant.

And it was like, how was that an effective form of communication based on my needs? Like you clearly didn't really know me. And so I ended up somewhere else because it's frankly pretty easy to open up an account now. Right.

And I think that's what we found out in FinTech, like account opening used to be kind of hard. Now it's pretty easy. The hard part is everybody is fighting for account primacy, share of wallet. the customer really engaging with your platform.

And so for us, tax is like that linchpin of something everybody has to do. It's difficult. And if you solve it, you're actually building a conversation with the customer about their life because everything good, bad, and otherwise comes out on the tax return. You lost a loved one, you got married, you moved, you got a promotion, you lost your job.

It's all there. And over the years, I've had the opportunity to talk to, you know, probably hundreds of Americans now that have gone through various life transformations. And that's where financial services companies make their business is by being available at that moment. And I think that's what that's our tagline at April is be there for the moments that matter.

And that's what we're helping our customers do. And so I think that was really the insight that we had is not just making the taxes easier and better, but it's actually transforming the way that they manifest themselves within the construct that is consumer finance in the United States. Opto: Yeah, I love the idea of, I mean, lot of people perceive taxes as a negative thing and trying to change the story to have it more received in a positive way, not just how you go through and do it so it's easier, but how it can help them do better.

Ben: Yeah, look, I think it's a side tangent a little bit from the question you had, but I think I get a lot of questions about the ⁓ construct, the system. And people say, we should have a flat tax, we should have no tax. Well, if you have no tax, you have no stake. And so I think actually the fact that we give all Americans a stake in our economy and our democracy is actually a phenomenal thing.

I think there's a lot more we could be doing to make people's voices more prevalent. But this customized tax system that we have actually is an incentive system. It's not really taxation. It's actually a social fabric that we've developed that explains at any moment in time, are we going to incentivize labor or capital?

Do we want people to start small businesses or do you want them to save? Like there's so many, do we want to incentivize clean energy? And then how do you account for the fact that we have 330 million population that spans all the way from Florida and Maine to Alaska, right? to Hawaii.

I mean, it's a huge populace. And we also have a federated system that has both state and federal tax. And I think people kind of forget about that. They're like, ⁓ well, we're just going to change the federal government.

It's like, great. But you have like 43 odd states that depend on that revenue. That's not so easy to just change. so ⁓ we obviously don't have a leg.

don't lobby. We've not lobbied the government to date. We think that that's Congress's decision based on the voter. ⁓ We didn't lobby against free file when it came out because we think that that's part of democracy and we want to better help Americans take advantage of what their elected officials have put into law.

I think that, yeah, I I understand people's frustration and criticism of the system for sure, but I do think there is a real opportunity to embrace what we have and find ways to make that more available to Opto: Yeah. And if we just step back a sec and talk about where you've come from a little bit, you didn't start out in tax. What pulled you into this space? Ben: Yeah, you know, I think most entrepreneurs start companies because there is an unsolved problem that they just cannot live if it is not solved.

And so, ⁓ you know, I started my career, you know, as mentioned at Deloitte, I ran a lot of the FinTech innovation. I, I worked with a lot of the largest insurance companies and banks and financial advisors at the board and CIO level. I then went to a venture fund called teammate, ⁓ that was really building in cybersecurity and FinTech and health tech and a lot of areas that have been ⁓ I'd say at this intersection of the new economy, right? Like where the rubber meets the road, ⁓ enabling activity in a safe and ⁓ reliable manner.

And in my time there, I built one of the first crypto custodians. We sold that business to PayPal. I then built a cyber and credit risk company that got sold to Moody's and Bitsight and is now the way that a lot of the cyber risk is ⁓ sort of ⁓ incorporated into the credit score. And so for me, I've always kind of operated at the fringe of building sort of these different financial technologies that are kind of maybe outside of the core payments lending, know, capabilities that, that, you know, are sort of, you know, well understood.

And, and so, you know, five years ago when I was going to go back to being an entrepreneur and I ended up spinning the company at a teammate, you know, for me, it's like, what did I want to do? I wanted to work on a problem. that was American centric. I believe in the United States, believe it's still the beacon of the free world.

We have our issues. We don't agree on everything, but I'm still a big believer in what we have here and the American people. And so I wanted to work on something that would benefit Americans. The second thing is I wanted to work on something that was experiencing sort of ⁓ a, had an opportunity for a paradigm shift.

And so I liked the idea of taking, not just making taxes more efficient. I think that that's like, interesting, but insufficient. I wanted to see how could we transform, you know, the entire idea of taxation in this country. And then the third is I wanted to ride the waves of the technology, you know, fundamental shift.

And we bet on AI before it was kind of well known. My partner, Daniel, was the CTO of Waze at Google. And we had an idea of what was coming and we saw a lot of these challenges within tax. How do you build a new tax engine?

How do you cut through the noise as data synthesis problems? We didn't know chat GPT was going to have the moment that it had, you know, three or four years ago, but we were kind of assuming that these technologies were going to keep improving and kind of bet the company very early on a lot of those things. And so those were sort of the three ingredients, you know, that, that really just said, I need to go all in and I, I need to solve this problem. Opto: That's awesome.

Yeah. mean, I've been here for eight months or so now and it's related to tax. But I love the idea that, you know, if you have a different mindset or you walk first and tax breaks in certain areas, the ability to move into different States here and like, you know, you can just move somewhere is incredible really. So, you know, you move somewhere that is more relevant to who you are as a person.

I thought we could just go into a bit more of the company and how it's growing. obviously it's building a lot of momentum. ⁓ It's doing really well recently. So what have been the biggest drivers behind the growth so far, probably ⁓ more recently.

Ben: Yeah, so we started the company about five years ago and actually we said we're going to raise a lot of money and we're just going to spend it in R &D. And so we spent all of our time basically building a version of Claude Code that was just retrofit for building tax law, translating tax law to code. Had I just built Claude Code, I guess I'd be on an island somewhere. But ⁓ whatever, everyone has their calling in life.

So this is mine and I'm very happy with it. ⁓ So, you know, we actually spent the first three years really as an R &D company, going state by state, getting these licenses, convincing partners. We had a lot of things we had to prove, right? If you think systematically, we had to prove we could build a tax engine.

We had to prove that it had efficacy and it would be accurate. We had to prove that we could sign up financial partners and we had to prove that we could originate their clients and deliver a good experience. We had an NPS of 76 on the last day of tax season where we did just shy of 10 % of all of our volume this year. That was really, you know, we worked really hard to be able to something like that.

And so we kind of recruited this core of 40 odd people and we were basically building the business team was very, very small. Chime was one of our, you know, first customers and they like, we did a beta and then a pilot and then an initial rollout. so we've, you know, been blessed with a, you know, a fruitful relationship with them, you know, over the years. And last year was kind of the first year that we really scaled up, you know, both in revenue, we got to our first million dollars of ARR.

That was after we'd already spent $50 million. So you can imagine our investors were kind of like, especially before the AI boom, had that like two year period where money was tight and it was really a show me the money market. I think there's another good example of like the illiquidity is actually very helpful in venture capital because of my investors could have sold out. think some of them, you know, might have at that moment because it was a tough moment.

Not that they didn't believe in us, but it was a scary time in the market, right? It was like, Hey, you have this company that has this great R and D potential, this great asset. Opto: We did. Ben: But all the learning comes kind of at very certain times in the year.

And the market was like really focused on revenue. And I said, look, this is an asymmetric bet and venture capital is risk dollars. It's not, I think we figured that out with the SaaS apocalypse. Like this is not an easy DCF to just write, right?

Like SpaceX wasn't a DCF, know, discounted cashflow model in the first 10 years of that company. ⁓ This is still the wild West if you want to do stuff. That's really transformational and innovative and breaking ground because you're doing things definitionally, you know, that haven't been done. saw last night, Elon Musk's like compensation package for space X is tied to him putting a million people on Mars.

Like, how do you. How do you build a model around that as like an equity analyst or like an underwriter? You're like, okay, if this works out, it might be phenomenally profitable and it may not work out, I guess, you know? ⁓ and then it's a question of like, how much belief do you have in management and the team and.

Opto: Alright. Ben: And to me, that's what venture capital was always about. It was always taking big bold bets, not by trying to conform to some like methodical spreadsheet that, you know, someone could lazily underwrite, you know, with basically chat, GPT now or cloud code. So, ⁓ you know, so we got through that and now we've been growing like crazy.

We grew nine X last year, you know, so best in class growth. think even in an AI era, we, had a, you know, very positive Q1 both in terms of what we achieved becoming you know, one of the largest e-filers in the country. ⁓ and, and also from a revenue perspective, you know, had a, had a really strong quarter again. So, you know, we're focused on the long-term.

I'm not worried about this quarter or this year. I'm worried about the next five, 10 years and what's possible. But I think, you know, some businesses are like, take off phenomenally quickly in venture. And then it sort of becomes a question of like, what's your moat?

How do you get escape velocity? think ours was. kind of the pain was upfront. It was very hard to build and very hard to get going.

But now that we've done this, hopefully we're in a very phenomenal position for years. Opto: Yeah, congrats. That's really impressive. What do you think mattered most in building trust with your key partners initially?

Ben: Thank you. You know, it was a lot about, we spent a lot of time doing education in the beginning because these are people that understand and are experts in payments and lending and financial services and consumer brands. And so they're actually, we learned from them. I think it's one of the beautiful things about April is that we've actually had dozens of leading product managers, designers, compliance, business leaders, look at our product, look at our business and provide feedback on it in addition to the millions of customers that we've now touched.

And so I think that that has made us much better. And we try to learn from that as much as possible. On the other hand, they didn't know anything about tax, really no one knew anything about tax. And so I think we spent a lot of time just explaining to people what our plans were, what the risks were, how we were going about them, how we were going about bridging the gap and incorporating tax compliantly into a regulated ⁓ financial entity.

But we also did it slowly, right? We said year one was pilot and then we moved to a partial rollout. then, so we didn't kind of go. gangbusters all at once.

And I think that that's another thing that's hard sometimes for venture capitalists to understand is they're always looking for this thing that just has this like insane curve. If you actually zoom out, our revenue run rate is an insanely steep J curve. But if you had looked at it month over month for years, it was very, very flat and not a lot of movement. And I think what people struggle with is that you're actually working backwards from something, right?

You're working backwards from saying at scale, what am I going to be and how am I going to get there? And then your P &L is going to translate out from that. And so for us, we always wanted to be the trusted tax partner for the largest, most trusted, biggest reach financial brands and platforms across the country. And so if you work backwards from that, the answer isn't like, how can I rent seek and charge those people the most amount of money in the early years?

I need to earn their trust. I need to make sure that I'm responsible with the volume and the customers that I'm taking. I need to make sure I'm doing their taxes correctly. And if I grow too quickly, we have far more demand today for some of our products than we do.

And the risk that we have is not, I sell this? It's can I deliver this in a trustworthy manner? And so we actually throttle that over time. But, you know, our view is if you zoom out, even if we grow a little bit slower, but we do it in a trusted way, that will be part of our differentiation.

and that will allow us to have a very profitable cash machine because we'll have achieved that, we will be in a very small category of companies able to deliver what we do at a very high scale. Opto: and you obviously have different segments of the market you're targeting. Is there one that stands out as being most exciting for you at the moment? Ben: You know, we've had a lot of those debates, right, because there's a lot of different ways to think about segmentation and market landscape.

And, you know, we started saying you have to solve for the least common denominator. So we started by solving for a W-2 that only had federal tax. And then we layered in a couple of states and more states than we got national. Then we've layered in K-1s.

And so we've gone up the complexity curve. And in tax, a lot of the money and a lot of the ⁓ sort of challenges arise when you go up the complexity curve. And in our view, we had to earn the right to do that. And so we started kind of with a moderate income, very mass market customer, maybe earning 40, 50, $60,000 a year.

We built kind of our reputation and our scale. And now we've been going up market. But at the end of the day, we're aiming to serve, you know, that 80 % in the middle of the bell curve, right? People that are comfortable using digital tools, you know, either income earning or, ⁓ you know, approaching retirement.

style Americans who are part of the labor force and are seeking to build better lives for themselves and their families. It's not that we can't serve the ultra wealthy or Americans that need more assistance, but I think that sort of our target is really the backbone of the American economy. And obviously you have some extremes at the edges of that. We're probably not the best solution, but that's really what we aim to be is the best solution for 80 % of them.

Opto: And are there new products or categories that naturally sit next to tax that you can talk about, obviously, because you probably got greater strategies that are interesting in the near time. Ben: Yeah, I I think our core focus is being a world-class tax infrastructure business, right? And so to us, that means not just doing tax prep. So we started with a self-preparation product.

We expanded heavily this year with our professional filing product. We actually have basically professional tax software, maybe that others can use today. We're not extending it, it's just used by our own, basically by our own tax team. And then you could think about ways that financial advisors or bookkeepers could tap into that software to basically be part of that ecosystem.

And so I think a lot of what we're focused on is how can AI and tax extend into places where it's been siloed. That goes back to our mission and our vision. And then there's a lot of room to take tax into day-to-day finances. So we have a consulting product.

We have a product that we launched with NASDAQ where we can, everyone that sells secondary shares gets a real time estimate. ⁓ of their ⁓ RSUs or NSOs, ISOs options and what their take home amount and what they need to pay. Now we're working on a solution to make those payments directly to the IRS. So there's so much within the world of tax just to make that experience better.

And then if you go into small business or into wealth management, I think there are ecosystems that are emerging. So within small business, there's a lot of tie into payroll and to bookkeeping. And again, I don't know that we are necessarily gonna be the ones to build that. But I think there's a lot of room to partner and have someone be the integrator of those capabilities.

And in wealth management, have estate, you know, the estate space, which has blown up. You have other elements of tax planning, financial planning, tax loss harvesting, insurance. And I think what everybody wants, the market wants, are these highly integrated services where all of this is bundled together. And so I think we want to be one of the provocateurs of the category.

I think we want to be the tax sleeve. I don't know yet if we want to own all of that, but I think we're actively seeking partners and builders that want to help create that future and make it a reality for all Americans. ⁓ Opto: Yeah, that's awesome. we touched on AI and how you started the company looking at it from that perspective, even before it became a big thing.

And obviously there's a huge hype around AI at the moment and a lot of products that talk about AI, but maybe don't integrate it as much as they sort of entail. Where is AI genuinely making April's product better today? How have you integrated it in? Ben: Yeah.

So, you know, I think I can talk about some of my views more, you know, more broadly. And I think, and I think it's that classic thing, right? AI can both be very real and be overhyped a little bit. And I think that's kind of like our, assessment of LLMs.

You know, we started, we really bet the company on it because for us to build a national tax engine that had a code base that covered the IRS and all States, ⁓ hadn't been done in years. And was done when the tax code was smaller and you could get away with a lower quality product. And so the only way we were ever going to get there is if we bet on AI. And so AI is actually part of the way that we coded our engine.

We believe that the engine needs to be deterministic. So we do not believe, for example, that tax calculations should be done by probabilistic, unexplainable, unaudable LLMs. I am very short that. And I think venture capitalists that are betting on LLMs being calculation engines in different part of the market are going to be sorely disappointed ⁓ in that.

So I think those are things where we don't believe, A, because it's not the future that we built for obviously, but I think just looking at it objectively, it doesn't really make a lot of sense when you think about it. ⁓ And then we've parlayed it into other areas of the business, right? So that's kind of our fundamental truth that we have this explainable deterministic code base that we maintain and improve with AI. But from there, Opto: No, of course.

Ben: You know, we've used it to expand our OCR. So we used to only be able to do W2s and one 1099 form. Now we're doing 15. Next year we're going to do 25.

We're doing get at a very high accuracy because Gemini keeps getting better and we've been using our own data to improve it. We use it in customer support. So in our self-prep product, ⁓ a very high percentage of customer contacts have been resolved using an AI agent. It's faster and more reliable in a lot of cases than a human.

we still are growing our human team and we still have human support for escalations or problem sets that are not, you know, are not ⁓ suited for the AI. ⁓ So I think, you know, there's, there's an element there. We're now using it to help our human tax professionals that are doing our professional tax returns. We're helping them review the return and catch mistakes that they otherwise wouldn't without the AI.

Our knowledge workers internally are using it for many different things from, you know, coding ⁓ our apps to you know, developing marketing collateral to tying out data in our finances. And so to me, I see the AI revolution much more similar, you know, to cloud. In the beginning, people were scared of the cloud. They didn't want to lose control.

But startups kind of went there very quickly and they're like, oh my God, I'm now liberated. I can go much faster. But at the end of the day, it was an enabler, right? Mobile also, like...

There are a few companies that wouldn't exist without mobile, like Uber is an example. It brought a platform to everyone's fingertips and you had mobile and cloud and the iPhone. And arguably, Uber wouldn't have existed without those three things. Those three things came together and you had a transformation in transportation.

⁓ So I see AI very, similar. I don't think it's that interesting to say, I'm a CRM, now I'm an AI enabled CRM. Opto: Yeah. Ben: If the CRM adopts AI, will probably be pretty good.

If it doesn't adopt AI, will probably not be good. Opto: Yeah, makes sense. Ben: You know, and, and, and, and I think we will see a lot of applications that were kind of always commodity applications, not, know, basically basic workflows, ⁓ that weren't highly integrated. you we swapped our recruiting software and AI one came out.

was better. We turned off the credit card. We moved to the other one. If the other guys would have developed a faster roadmap, we probably would have stayed.

So I think like, I think what AI is actually doing is putting a lot of the competition back into execution mode. It's like whoever delivers the best, the best, cheapest, fastest product is going to win. And I think that's great. Like that's, isn't that what we want in a capitalist society, like innovation and, yes, the investment landscape is changing and underwriting is changing and there's disruption in labor markets.

But I think that that's all moment in time. And I think we will develop a new framework. Right now frameworks are kind of broken. And when you have framework dislocation, know, humans like some level of predictability.

And I think, but I think that also creates tremendous opportunity. And so we love this. We love independent thinking. And we also think a lot of things in market are being applied incorrectly.

And we think that's part of our competitive edge. I don't think that an AI can replace a human for a lot of work. think it's not good enough. I think it's not ⁓ original enough.

And so I think you have to be really discerning about constantly reassessing, you know, are we ready for the next thing? Or where actually can I enable the human or where should I not be putting AI because it's just not up to par. So I think people that are just slapping it on everything without any thought, I don't see that as a winning strategy. Opto: And so we didn't touch on this earlier, April obviously helps you fill out your taxes and do it in a really simple way.

Does it also proactively suggest ways that you might approach tax in a better way to save more tax and things like this as well? Ben: That's what we're working on now. So we'll, have a lot of announcements on sort of more of the tax planning, tax scenario analysis, tax simulation. I think there have been tools that have launched that have been really good.

You know, Holista plan has been around for a little while that works for financial advisors. ⁓ A company called Altruist announced something called Hazel where they're, basically taking the goodness that LLMs are and bringing it to financial advisors, you know, to, have some kind of quick insights. think we're April really has the ability to differentiate. is around the very specific calculations and the very specific synthesis.

It's one thing to say, Ben might be eligible to do something. It's another thing to say, and here's the precise tax impact that is going to happen. And I think that's the world that we sort of foresee us differentiating our services and our IP around. Opto: That's cool.

Very interesting. mean, today, is there any features in the app that you find really interesting that might be underrated and not use as much as you'd like? Ben: ⁓ you know, it doesn't exactly work that way for us because we don't have this sort of giant app that's available. We actually exist in, in, in manifest in different ways in somebody else's application.

So today, if you went to Zen business, as an example, you would see the ability to, ⁓ bank as a small business owner, you'd have the ability to get a consultation with us. About the tax consequences of starting your business. You'd have the ability to file your taxes. You might have the ability.

Opto: Yeah. Ben: know, soon to do, you know, some other things on that platform. You know, if you look at, ⁓ if you look at Chime as an example, you have the ability to get paid early, the ability to save, the ability to send money. You have the ability to, you know, to get your, you know, to get your tax refund five days early.

So we're an infrastructure businesses. We exist as part of somebody else's ecosystem. And yes, I think we have capabilities. You know, I think the one we launched with NASDAQ as an example, I think that should exist in every trading.

brokerage in the country. Why wouldn't you give the customer transparency into the exact tax consequence of their, you know, but things in financial services sometimes move slowly and then move all at once. And so I think that's what we learned is that patience is not a bad thing in our business. And we're often, you know, sometimes 12 to 24 months ahead of the rest of Opto: And is there anything that you believe that people misunderstand about tax and technology?

Ben: I think that to imagine a future, right? Like I remember when the iPhone came out and it was, was, you you, people are, have their own like ways about them, right? ⁓ And so for me, I had a cell phone, had an iPod and I was just like, these things should go together. And then like when Apple came out with the iPhone, you were like, obviously executing it was really hard.

If you asked most executives at Motorola or Blackberry, they would have said like, what are you talking about? Like, whatever, right? And that obviously like not only disrupted and basically put some people out of business, but it totally changed the world. And I think when I look at tax, like when you look at some of the problems, the problems are because people only touch it a week or two a year and they leave it for the last minute.

And so imagine if you were trying to get healthy and you were like, you know what? I got my physical in two weeks. Time to get on the treadmill. Like That's, that's, it's it's very hard for a doctor or, or, ⁓ you know, a physical trainer to like help you improve your health, but be like, you're not really going to get the results you want.

And so I think our challenge at April is how do we work with these financial institutions that really have the relationship and are driving forward savings, investing, spend payments? How do we work with them to change the, the mental framework that Americans have with tax and realize this is actually an ongoing thing. It's like nutrition, physical activity, savings. You can't just do it once in a while when you want.

It's actually a habit and part of your vernacular you have to get comfortable with. And I think it doesn't matter what the technology does. It can get better. can, but until we actually change the way that people think about this, we're not going to actually affect the future and reality that the American public wants and deserves.

Opto: you can see how if you're doing scenario mapping you can understand why people might be more proactively looking at it throughout the year because it becomes more of an interesting thing for them. Last question and yeah thanks very much for the time here today. What's the next chapter for April? Ben: Yep.

It's all about scale and growth and impact, right? We spent four to five years building quietly, arduously, know, a lot of long nights, a lot of long weekends, a lot of people that did, you know, some really, I think borderline heroic things to make this possible. And now it's our opportunity to, you know, have an impact and take this technology to market and get in front of every American household with one of our products and help them. have a better financial outcome.

And if we'll have done that, then I think we'll have built a really great company that hopefully is around for generations. Opto: Thanks, Ben. Yeah, it's really incredible to hear your story and what you've achieved really. So, yeah, congratulations.

And yeah, hopefully I have time to talk to you again in the future. Ben: Thanks so much for having me. 100%. Opto: Bye.