Leif Abraham: Reinventing Investing for Serious People

Speaker A: What's it like being here on election day? So today is November 5, 2024. We're here in New York City. What is it like as someone who, I'm assuming you can't vote? Uh, can't vote yet, but not yet. But yeah. What is that like, seeing just the craziness of American politics?

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker C: first off, I think there is. I genuinely appreciate the pride that Americans have for, uh, recognizing how important democracy is and that there's like, you know, a lot of pride in going to vote and so on. I think that is generally good. Not saying that's not happening in other countries necessarily, but I do think there's a certain, like, you get the sticker and whatnot, you know, and, and you know, someone was telling me today that they like brought the whole family out and then, you know, they brought the kids to vote and like showed them how it's done now. Like, not like swing states.

Speaker A: I mean, here in New York, if

Speaker C: you, if you, if you trust everything on Twitter, you'll be like, you know, yeah, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be. Yeah, we've heard about kids, little immigrants, everyone, everyone yesterday. Yeah, North Carolina, you know, but like, yeah, and, and like, I, I totally appreciate that.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Like, I mean, other than that. Yeah, of course, you know, it's a fairly divided country right now. Let's be effing honest.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: I feel like every, you know, we were looking at, through like my, my X feed, it's every other thing is either election poll, Trump, comma, something like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, mhm. Yeah, it's taking over right now, but it is a lot of fun. We're going to go back to the hotel tonight and uh, I don't know what we're going to get for food yet. We got to figure that out. But, but we are just going to watch election coverage for like seven hours. Yeah, you know, red zone for football.

Speaker C: You've seen that, heard about it.

Speaker A: But like the Octobox, you got eight games on at once. That's what we're going to do. But with like Fox News, cnn, msnbc, we're going to have.

Speaker C: There must be a bar in New York where you can do that. I cannot imagine. There's not a bar in New York. We can walk in and you're going to have essentially those like eight screens happening tonight with that.

Speaker B: That must be.

Speaker A: We're going to do that in our hotel room.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And it's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker B: I wanted to say too Uh, I was sent, uh, Public's, um, X post about the election. Right. And I saw it and it was like, you know, vote for, you know, your pick or place your bet, um,

Speaker A: who's going to win the election.

Speaker B: I was like, oh, this is like a polymarket thing or like a Robin Hood thing. So this is a really interesting thing. I click on the link and it goes right to voting for the actual. Or registering to vote for the candidate. How'd y' all think of that? Was that a. Yeah, a marketing team decision or how did that come up? Come up?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was just like, you know, we once in a while we always do these little marketing stunts and whatnot when something comes up. And obviously election betting, um, or you know, call it certain futures contracts, uh, uh, trading of, you know, uh, uh, of that obviously has gone bonkers in the last few weeks between Kalshi and then obviously Robinhood launched, you know, their version of it. And um, um, generally speaking, we always try to also ensure that we're a company where people understand that we're on the side of proper investing and so placing a bet on who's going to win the election in the same place where you will have your retirement account. This may be a little questionable to some regards. Um, not saying we won't ever go and do futures trading, but um, uh. And so we're just like, you know, as Robin the Launcher too and whatnot. We just put that as like little marketing stunts to essentially be like, you know, election betting done. Right. And when you click on the website, it just drives you to finding your, you know, your polling station, so to say.

Speaker B: Because some of the language on us website is, you know, voting or uh, investing for serious investors or profitable investors.

Speaker A: Right, yeah.

Speaker B: Is that kind of where that stems from?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. I think when you look at, um, when you look at specifically consumer fintech and I'm guiding it a little, but if you look specifically at consumer fintech and that first generation, I think there has been a lot of kind of gamified finance, which means your uh, roundup, your um, payday loan that has some twist to it. Um, and in investing that has been really heavily been kind of like gamified trading. Right. So the easiest way to do options trading or CFD trading in Europe and things like that. And I feel like that has been very much that first, first generation of consumer fintech also. It's just like, especially in the U.S. um, and I think what came out of that is that, yeah, that place where you build A serious portfolio for yourself. And a little bit that platform for that next generation, um, hasn't really happened yet. And that's obviously what we are building and continues to build, um, is to really kind of build that platform that can be that, you know, Schwab for the next generation. For lack of better wording.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How does that work? Like the philosophy behind what you're doing at public, where you say, you know, there is a more, you know, noble way to invest your money or something like that. Is that, is that how you describe it? As the philosophy that we're going to be for the serious investor? We're not here to, to basically have a sports book?

Speaker C: Um, exactly like that. Um, stop here. Um, yeah, essentially. I mean, again, um, if you look at the incumbents, um, you have serious investing platforms, they're just a little bit clunky and outdated. And um, they're often built to funnel you into talking to a financial advisor. And there's a little bit the sense of that. Either we want to funnel you to talk to a financial advisor and to basically clip 1 or 2% of your portfolio every year for managing it for you entirely, or on the other end, um, if you don't want to do that, please do a bunch of options trading because that's where we make the most money. On if you're self directed, and that has been a little bit the camp in the old world and then again in those generations, people start somewhere on the fringes. And I think the first generation of investing trading apps in the US of these, of that newer cohort has started on the side of more speculation, more active trading. Um, and then where we really always came was like, we actually think that the best model kind of sits in the middle between the completely managed and someone does it for yourself and passive and the really active trading every day. Um, and we also think that this generation, you know, called like the Millennials and co, they've been kind of growing up with way more financial literacy earlier in their lives, which gives them way more confidence on their, you know, on their own investing strategies and ideas that they have. And so they are a little bit self directed first, not saying that they will not have parts of the portfolio managed at some point, or they also go super active, you know, on something they find fun or so on. It's all good. But generally speaking they are more self directed first. And so hence we saw this opening in the middle where it's a sense of build a platform where you can build your proper portfolio, you have all asset classes in one hand. But, um, you're still driving your own strategies.

Speaker B: If you don't run public by yourself, you have a co CEO Jannik and Josiah and I run demo day together. And we're really, really early on in our company's journey. Public's way further along than we are. How have you and Jannik worked together to be co CEOs and lead this company?

Speaker C: Well, so Yannick, I know each other for quite some time. Um, we had a mentor together, a guy called Henrik Verdelin, who's Danish, started Barkbox. If I have a dog, you might know this, like, this like subscription box for dog toys and treats and stuff, um, and so on. And he had this incubator in New York called Pre Hype. Um, and that's essentially where I met Janik. Was um, literally like a old shitty office in Chinatown where you had to like walk in. The descriptions were like, if you feel like you're walking to a sweatshop, you're on the right track. And then when you go into the elevator, you had like literally like an old Chinese man sitting in the elevator all day. Because it was like one of these old elevators where you have to like pull that, you know, and then the thing goes up, you know. Um, anyway, so that was like the incubator, aka you know, a bunch of people building stuff in a, you know, box somewhere in some sweatshop back in Chinatown. And um, but anyway, so, so that's where we met. Um, Janik had a company, other company. We both sold our companies at similar times and that's when we kind of came together to, to do public together. And so first off, there was some trust and respect and so on. Before we started it, it was not that we like met at some startup event and then we're like, we should sell a company together. Let's go tomorrow. Um, that obviously helps. And then the way the company is structured is that we have our own direct reports. And so we. High level strategy is something we do, we decide on together. High level roadmap. We decide together on, uh, really high level. And then essentially day to day product design. Janik runs day to day growth. So to say I run and then there's like a cinematic kind of teams that also just run like finance and operations and whatnot. But we have, I, uh, would say quite awesome senior team that obviously can run that fairly autonomously there as well. But, um, that's roughly how it's kind of divided. And I think that helps a lot that the responsibility is just really clear and so that in the day to day there's very quick decision making because it's not that like every single decision in the company has to be decided between the two of us, but it's really more of the like, really high level strategic decisions. And I think what we've seen is that being two people, um, you have some better balanced decision making. Because at the end of the day, we're all human beings. And it helps a lot to have someone who, uh, experiences, uh, everything the exact same way that you do, with the exact same incentives as well, and the exact same goals that they have. You know, because, you know, we have the same ownership, we have the same, uh, uh, you know, view into the company, so to say we sit, we share an office together every day. Right? Um, and, um. And I think that is like the baseline for that. But then also it just extends into this, into the sense of that, um, we all human beings, we will all have a bad day, one, like at some point and we might make emotional decisions. But by having someone that can counter that, I think you balance decisions better. Because, you know, if one of us is super stressed today and like, maybe makes a call a little bit, you know, from the hip, then there's someone there to also just like, check that a little bit. And for that counterparty to check that is someone who experiences everything the same way that you do, has the same incentives that you do, has the same goals that you have some regard. Um, and I think that is really good and healthy for the important decisions that have to be made in the company.

Speaker A: Kind of reminds me of consuls in Rome, where you'd have two consuls to rule all of Rome together, and they'd work together in that way. So what specific problem did you and Janik see in the world back before public was ever even, you know, it was just an idea. What specific problem did you see that? You said, we're going to create a solution for that. And that became public.

Speaker C: So first we saw that most, um, people did not start investing until they're like mid-30s in most cases. And it was heavily driven by people were just starting when they had some life event, they maybe got a child and maybe inherited some money. Um, and those were like the kind of catalyst events for people to actually start to do that. And then maybe they had some too much savings saved up, but they didn't know what to do with yet. And so what to do with now. And, um, a big reason of that at the time was, uh, we looked at the kind of like the median Average, um, savings of a millennial in the country. And it was like two and a half grand or something at the time. Um, but also at the time like Amazon or Google, stock price was like $2,000. And so you pretty quickly realized that if you wanted to actually build a portfolio, it was kind of hard because the way you would build it is to essentially dollar cost, average yourself and do a portfolio with every paycheck that comes in.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: You wouldn't necessarily start off with like, I have 50 grand right now, I need to deploy, let's go. But you would, you know, build your portfolio over time with every paycheck that comes into the door. And that was really hard. And so the first kind of problem that we, so to say solved with the platform was that we were the first to do, uh, fractional investing in the stocks and basically breaking that down and making it possible to just buy any stock with any amount of money. Um, but it also just helped people in terms of, uh, portfolio allocation. And like, I think we all think of dollar amounts when we allocate our portfolio. Like if you would call some broker right now, in the old days, you wouldn't tell them, buy me four shares of xyz. You would be like, put two grand into blah, blah. And because we'll think of dollar amounts, obviously we don't think necessarily in shares all the time. Um, and so that was a little bit the kind of first, um, um, move that we did. And then from there we essentially fractionalized every other asset class. We recently launched fractional stocks. Obviously crypto is fractional by design already. Which is another reason also why this generation kind um, of expects this experience. And I think when now someone signs up for public and they just type in a dollar amount to buy something, they wouldn't think twice about it. They would just be like, this is just how this works. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so on. And so that was like the first thing to really solve. But essentially it was really about helping people to build a portfolio earlier in their lives to break that barrier down and then, uh, uh, from there do that again from, uh, more of a long term mind to really build something that you kind of compound over time. And that comes again from this mindset of that you actually likely built it up in your early days or like earlier in your life from your paychecks and that just continuously, you know, kind of goes over time.

Speaker B: What piece of advice would you give someone like myself and Josiah as we grow and lead a company together, as we're friends, before we became founders Together. But what piece of advice would you give someone like myself and Josiah, um, in regard to what, leading a company like you do with your friend Janik, who's, you know, before y' all were founders together, y' all were, like, in some capacity.

Speaker A: In regard to, like, keeping our friendship at the same time as being able to work well together. Um,

Speaker C: super honest. I. So on. If I just dive on the friendship piece again, um, I would argue that it's always better to be business partners first than to be friends first. Um, because at the end of the day, you should be super aligned in the business. And, uh, um, you know, there's always also the emotional side of being friends, of course, and you kind of need to put that by side as such. I would say that Yannick and I became better friends over time by being business partners. But we started, like, we were acquaintances. We weren't, like, best buds when we started public together. Right. So, um. And, um, I think that, uh, in my experience, I think, um, generally speaking, like, like works better.

Speaker A: Did you ever have a big disagreement with Janik at any point that almost meant you guys had took different directions, uh, and one of you maybe left public? And if you did have a time like that, could you tell the story of how you rekindled.

Speaker C: We have disagreements all the time, of course, and we will hash those out. Um, but never. And never, never that bad, in a sense. And I think it comes back to always be incredibly honest on everything and be able to just speak your truth at all times. And, um, with that, also, just from a notion of, like, never taking anything personal and just, you know, if you discuss the issue very clearly, like, we have moments where, like, we're literally, like, shouting at each other with swear words, for example, you know, um, about a certain thing. And then 30 seconds later, as heated as that argument was, Will might talk completely calmly about some other thing. And, um, you know, and I think it's just having this, like, very clear distance of, like, we're just hashing something out right now. Um, and in most cases, also, there's this general respect of, like, understanding that the other person likely has a point that you are not seeing that they're arguing from. They were just not necessarily yet able to articulate it in a way that you understand their point and vice versa. And so you're right now just basically trying to find that misalignment. But once you find that misalignment of, like, oh, that's where you're coming from. That's why you think that now I Get it now, I understand this point, but also maybe I have this other point that now and like, and then you kind of get, get to the agreement. And so generally speaking, I think we never really had any disagreement where we didn't agree in the end because at the end of the day we have the same business goals, you know, and

Speaker A: that sounds like, ah, it takes a lot of humility to be able to say anytime this person's making a point, and obviously it comes from experience of knowing he's smart, he's made a lot of great calls in the past. But being able to take that, take that step to say, I'm going to try to see it from your point of view and understand that you are saying something of value here, something of an effect, I just can't see it. I'm going to try to get there. I think the humility required to do that is actually pretty rare in people. Would you say that that is pretty critical to be a great founder? It's having the humility to be able to listen to other people's, you know, ideas enough to be able to, to know when you're saying no to that idea. At least you, you fully understand what

Speaker C: they're trying to argue a hundred thousand percent. A hundred percent. And. But I think, um, I'd argue it's easier as a founder than as an employee because as a founder you're always getting back to wanting for your baby to be successful and that is what you truly in the end care about. And because you're at the top of the food chain, at least in your organization. Any political things of what my next promotion is and how did I look in this meeting and blah, blah, blah, doesn't really matter to you. So I think it's actually way easier as a founder, as an employee and as an employee I think it's that in most organizations and you want to try to root that out as much as possible, but everyone's just human at the end. In most organizations people will still have this like, in them of like, how did I look, how was I perceived? And that's, I think, why in a lot of organizations you have a little bit, the sense of it's tough for people to admit they were wrong or you know, um, and so on because, because a lot of people in most organizations still very much care about how they're perceived by others, um, especially their boss or the CEO of the company or whatever. Um, and that sucks because it's in the way of good work in most cases and therefore you want to try to root that out as much as possible. Um, but I think most people will still kind of, you know, think about that a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah, I kind of want to shift over to. I've just been thinking about it. I don't know how you feel about Robinhood, but I would assume that Robinhood is pretty much a direct competitor to public. And I mean, is that something that you guys. Do you see them that way? Like, do you see them as the competition and you want to beat them every single day? Or is it more like, you know, they're just an adjacent company that does similar things to us? Uh, but we're doing our own thing.

Speaker C: I think it's more the latter because I think we are more competing with the Schwab and fidelity of this world. Um, also, if we would steal Aum, um, from somewhere, you know, we're likely would steal it more from there.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker C: And I would argue, you know, Robinhood has built a really good product. They have, um, obviously we have opinions on how we conduct business and, you know, just a sense of how quickly do you might want to funnel someone into an options trade and things like that. But, um. Uh, but generally speaking, you know, I think what is good about having something like, uh, Robinhood in the market for us is that, you know, they are, I think, one of the competitors where we look at. And it kind of keeps us on our toes in terms of product quality, um, versus the incumbents. It's like the complete opposite. Like, you open, you know, when we launched bonds and we look at the competition and, like, what bond trading and investing looks like on the. Like, on the incumbents. Like, you press a button and you look like you're being sucked through a time machine to 1996. And that's like a table with serif fonts and, like, dropdowns where three things don't work. And, like, it's crazy, you know?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, and so I would argue that, you know, obviously, I would love to have no competition.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: But I think the one thing that if you have talented competitors, uh, uh, like, if you have talented competitors, I think what it does, it creates some pressure for product velocity. It's, you know, creates pressure for raising the bar internally as well and so on. And I think if you have bad competition, it also. Or easy competition, um, uh, it can maybe also, you know, make your org lazy because they make you really successful, obviously, because you can beat them very easy. But so. So that's how I look at it. Definitely more adjacent. You know, of course, we're stealing users from them here, or they might steal from us here and whatnot. That always happens. But, um, I would say they're on a certain track now, and it's definitely slightly different from the track that we are on.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker B: Public's seen a ton of growth over the last several years. Tons of customers, tons of money being put in and taken out of the platform. How do you deal with the pressure of, uh, being able to handle that much money on your app, as well as all these customers flocking to public every single day?

Speaker C: Um, our CTO often has the nickname of Chief Security Officer, uh, which sounds funny, but it's obviously a good thing. Um, you know, there's obviously a little bit this principle of, like, you know, move fast and don't break things, um, because when you deal with people's money, um, you have to be twice as cautious. Also, we're in a regulated space.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so, like, when we have downtime, there's scenarios where we're liable for losses and stuff like that. And so, like, we cannot be down. Like, over the last 12 months, we had 30 minutes of accumulative downtime, like, which is.

Speaker A: That's amazing.

Speaker C: Like, nothing comparably speaking.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, and that stuff is super important, obviously, when you deal with people's money. Um, and so that, yeah, it creates a ton of pressure, no question. Um, but, uh, on the other hand, also knowing how much downtime the incumbents have, especially recently, um, it's also something that I think you can use to your advantage. Whenever Fidelity is down. We have a great day.

Speaker A: Uh, so it sounds like millennials and Gen Z are probably more likely to go to be towards a public.com, they'd say, oh, this is kind of right up my alley. How are you reaching the older generations who are. Are just, you know, they've been using Fidelity or Schwab for the last 40 years. Some of them, maybe. How do you reach out to those people and turn them into public.com users?

Speaker C: The honest reality is we don't do that much. Like, obviously, it happens through just general things that you do and products that you launch, campaigns that you run and whatnot. Like, it just organically happens, of course, as well. Yeah, but we're not actively going after them. Um, we are.

Speaker A: Really.

Speaker C: What we're going actively after is like, the top 25% of millennials. That's like the core of our. That's like the core core of our user base. Right. And you can be like, plus Gen Z, who was over 18 and maybe, you know, plus Gen Xs who are, you know, younger than 50 or, you know, that you can try to narrow it down even more and whatnot. But generally speaking, it's like the top 25% of millennials. That's, uh, our, like, core target demographic. And so even internally, we always talk about if we spend money to acquire a customer, we want to target those dollars as perfectly as possible to that type of audience.

Speaker A: What's been your most successful ad campaign targeted towards, uh, that. That millennial group?

Speaker C: Um, a good and healthy product.

Speaker B: With the Dumb Money movie, you know, you did a $25.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Ticket in and, you know, you get some money towards your public account.

Speaker C: And like, we do, like, we try to do, like, creative campaigns things all the time, back to the, you know, election betting, you know, little Twitter stunt and stuff like that. Um, do those work? But I wouldn't, I wouldn't look at that stuff necessarily always as, like, read user acquisition drivers, like, in terms of, like, direct response. How I think about it more is, um, as you build a company, um, you want to find moments where you can prove your values. Not just talk about them, but we can prove them in action. And that can be how you execute on your product. Like, we've done things like safety labels, which we invented. Now some other people are doing it too, but, like, where we basically, if a stock is very volatile to invoice etf, sometimes more risky, we have, like, little safety labels that tell you about those risks. You know, when we went off payment for order flow on the, you know, regular equities trading side, like, that was, for example, one of the moves where, like, you prove your values, you prove what you're standing for and the actions that you take as a company. Um, but that can also come across in certain campaigns that you run. For example, like, the whole thing of us being for serious investors and so, like, betting on the election the same place we have your retirement account, maybe not a good idea, uh, from a brand perspective, for even. At least, you know, and hence we did this little stunt which is just underlying again, what our values as a company are. Ah. And so I think as you build your company to just always look for these opportunities to show off these values. Because when we think about retention of a customer, there's the utilitarian retention of flag, of spiderwing. That's retention. That comes from it being a good product that does what it says it would do. It might be cheap or all these things, but these are things that are also easy to compete with. There can Always be someone who makes it freer than free or cheaper than you do it. There's always like, you build a cool feature that is unique to you for a year and then suddenly everyone has it, you know, like, so you will, you will always kind of sprint after the next thing on your differentiation. And like what the retention that is driven from the utility that you provide. Now on the other end you have emotional retention. And emotional retention comes from people, um, essentially having an ah, emotional connection to you as a company. And they are with you and they're sticking with you because of that connection. And that connection is mostly built actually through things that hit the heart more than the brain. Um, and those are driven by values, and those are driven by. I really think this company is awesome. Like, they do things the right way. And you know, and that can be driven by features as well. Like, you could argue that us going off pimifoloflow is maybe also a feature in regard that someone could copy, of course. But you know, but there are these things that kind of push the values and therefore this value alignment with your customers. And so someone does not just pick you for the utility you provide, but they also pick you and stick with you for, you know, that alignment that they feel with that company. And that is something that's obviously hard to measure on whatnot. But that emotional retention is something we always have, you want to have an eye on because, uh, that is incredibly hard to compete with. Someone can, like, some competitor can always build the same features that we built or try to copy them or whatever. It's really hard for them to replicate the emotional connection someone feels with our company. Really, really, really hard. And that's, I think what's where some of these marketing things that underlying these values, um, help as well.

Speaker A: And I imagine that would definitely increase word of mouth, uh, just sharing about, hey, I love this app. You got to download it.

Speaker C: Exactly because. Exactly 100%. Because what happens essentially is that let's say we meet in a bar right now, right? We're hanging out, you pull out, you know, the other green app. And um, my reaction then as a user of Public shouldn't just be, oh, uh, you know, I use Public. It's a little cleaner and whatnot. It's like, you know, my reaction should be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You get combative, you know, like, what the fuck? You should use public. You know, like, put this back in your pocket. Like, delete this app right now. You know, give me like, I'm giving you this code. You want to Transfer account over the public. Here's why. M M M. And those bullet points, right? Those are most cases, not just features, but they're points of like, value alignment, right? And you essentially, whenever you find something, as you build the company where you can create this value alignment pieces and prove that to your users, they become arguments that you arm your customers with. That makes them even. Like, that gives them the ability to rally on your behalf, right? You're essentially giving them these, like, rallying points so they can go to other people and be like, you know, this is awesome because of bum, bum bum. Some of them might still be features, of course, you know, but generally speaking, you know, the, like, value alignment things are also the ones that make people emotional about it, right? Like my reaction of like, whoa, what the fuck? Like, put this back in your pocket, you know, like, like, that would only come if I have some sort of, like, emotional reaction to this. It would not come because I think the, you know, I don't know, the, the, you know, watch list management feature in public is better than, you know, the other companies. Like, it won't, you know, like, what's

Speaker A: a company that's doing this right now that you use? And you would say you're inspired by the way that, like, you would go out and you would tell anybody, you got to download this app or you gotta, you gotta try on these shoes or whatever it is. Is there a company that you think does this really well for you, that you get inspired by to say, let's try to implement this in public?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's tough. I'm sure there's a lot of things in, like, just like, consumer goods that try to do this, but I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff on, you know, on, you know, like, healthy eating and whatnot. Do that.

Speaker B: Like, same with Beehive and Substack. You know, people are so passionate about one or the other. It's like, oh, why would you use, you know, X when you could use this? And I use this because. Or I'm the same way with Google Maps.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: I hate Apple Maps.

Speaker A: I love Apple Maps.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I try to get everyone to get on Apple Maps, Google Maps.

Speaker C: It's not even close.

Speaker B: It's so much better. The exact same reaction is kind of what you want.

Speaker C: Yeah. I do think, and it's the most cliche example. I'm really, really sorry. But Apple does a really good job of this.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And they do a good job of this. Especially when you, for example, look at how they push privacy. Privacy as A value that they build into all their products. Right. Or how they are building all the health features now in all those ad

Speaker B: campaigns that are so privacy focused.

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. And so like they uh, are. They are. And I was also, also feature driven. But you, but you, but you feel a little bit of ethos of the company in this stuff, you know. And um, and you can totally see how by extension of that, you know, you will trust your data more and you know, maybe on your iPhone than you might on your Android potentially, you know, and stuff like that.

Speaker A: So yeah, on top of just delivering great for your customers, for your users, what is public doing to, to like prove to their, to your users that you have this ethos? Because I can feel it just sitting here in the room with you. But most of your users probably don't even know who you are, but they can feel the ethos that you're talking about that you're animated with right now in the app. How did you accomplish that? How did you get people to be able to go out in a bar, say you should delete that app, Download public?

Speaker C: Yeah. First off, I think we could do a 10 times better job at that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: To be quite honest. And I think it goes into the nitty gritty of like taking people on the journey.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Literally in your onboarding, when you sign up for public, what are the first three statements when you come into the app that you see about public as a company? Not just the features you provide of like get, you know, 4.6% your cash, like great. Which is, you know, anyone can do that. So like it falls into onboarding, it falls in your top of funnel marketing, it falls very heavily into your pr, I would say, like that's, I think where a lot of that happens. Um, and it just build over time. But I can guarantee you, you will find a ton of public users who might not even be able to be that aware because they might have just stumbled over the app, downloaded it and skipped through the onboarding and started investing. And that's what they do now and they like the UI of it. And then over time you kind of need to nurture these people to make sure of like, hey, by the way, have you recognized that this is how we think as a company? And it's like certain things that we've done and whatnot. But um, yeah, and back to that point, I think it's because it's about retention and it's about what comes with that, which is word of mouth to your point. Um, it's not Just something that only happens on top of funnel. It's something that happens throughout the experience at all time. And so safety labels is now that little thing. I know a bunch of people copied it now, but like seeing little things in the experience where you kind of recognize like they're a little bit more transparent, where you recognize like, oh, this is kind of cool like that. They actually tell me this is risky. Like I wouldn't have expected that. I would have thought they just like pump me into whatever is the most risky because they make money on it.

Speaker A: It reminds me of Community notes on X. Like the way that, that safety label.

Speaker C: Great example, you know, great example.

Speaker A: You sort of just everyone can feel a little bit like, okay, I'm not just being manipulated all the time. Every time I read some post, I actually can get a more objective like metric on. Okay, you know, this is true. This is bogus. Um, yeah.

Speaker C: And the existence of that feature tells you about the ethos of the company.

Speaker A: M. Yeah.

Speaker C: And so 100%, that's really cool.

Speaker B: How do you feel like the next couple of years of growth will look like for public? What are some things you want to accomplish that you'll be proud of if this ends up happening? Um,

Speaker C: from a pure business perspective, profitability. That's one. We're still a money burning company, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But we also want to be high growth and so we're like a little bit like on purpose, uh, still, um, still burning. Um, we have a lot in the kicker. Uh, and this sounds again really cliche but we have a lot that we're working on in terms of how AI plays a role in your portfolio building. Um, that I'm quite excited about. Um, so a lot of things are going to happen there over the next year.

Speaker B: Because the product's called Alpha. Correct. How does that work?

Speaker C: Yeah, so Alpha right now is essentially helping you as like a research assistant and you can think of it as like push and pull. So on the one side you can just swipe down on any stock and ask any question about the stock and it's basically just a way to do really quick bite size research. Right. Swipe down on random example Tesla. Uh, like how many cars has Tesla delivered last quarter? And like this just tells you because you're chart for it and stuff like that. Um, then, uh, but then also it basically gives you these like proactive alerts of what's happening in the markets and around certain assets. So a stock is moving for some reason today. Um, we actually give you an alert and like a little card under the stock chart that tells you of like hey, this is likely where the stock is moving right now. And M. If you tap on that, you get a more detailed breakdown on that. Um, through the Alpha Assistant. Um, if there's an earnings call, you will actually get like an earnings call recap. Um, uh, in your inbox in the app, literally like an hour after the earnings call or something depending on which stock it is now work. Um, uh, and so on. And so like it's basically giving these like more fundamental insights around the markets and the company or uh, companies, um, as you kind of go through the experience in some way. And so that's what Alpha is right now. And then obviously the next step for Alpha is like to, to help you a little bit more in like guidance and advice to some regard. Um, um, and that's a little bit the next phase. Um, that's, that's you know, would like to happen around it.

Speaker B: Is there anything that like runs into that, like a problem that runs into that? Because I feel like so many people will put on X. Right. You know, this is not investment advice.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: But is Alpha trying to provide investment advice or is it more just guiding you to the right decision right now?

Speaker C: No investment advice, it's all just factual data essentially that you can request that you just, just a different way to kind of request information, but there's no advice.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Um, but in the future how we think about it is that again the, the, the, the old incumbent world was essentially either you fully manage to everything yourself or you have a financial advisor who does everything entirely for you and they make the decision pretty much on your behalf. And that spectrum we think is actually much wider. And in that width of that spectrum, if you look at more in the middle, there's something we internally call guided investing where you are still the initiator, you might still make the last decision, but there's some guidance along the way. Uh, and that's where we see a lot of opportunity where it's not a study about immediately everyone does everything for you or tells you this is right or this is wrong, but more of a sense of guiding you through your decisions in some way. And that's we think where a lot of AI or where AI can play a really great role.

Speaker A: For the founders watching this, is there any one book that you would recommend to read for any founder who wants to go from 0 to 1 and 1 to 100?

Speaker C: I like the Messy middle from Scott Belsky. Um, because it's just very practical. It's very practical. Good of little nuggets and stories in there. There's one quote in the messy middle that I always tell people a bunch. Also get a little bit like, business ethos, wise, um, which is the end of. The end of a negotiation is the beginning of a relationship, um, which is just like, I love it so much from the perspective of, um, how to conduct yourself in negotiations into, you know, kind of knowing that you're building a business relationship and like, that you, you know, it's not just about getting the best fucking deal possible and fucking everyone over and, you know, like, like, while you're trying to get to that, uh, outcome, but where, you know, like, a good deal is one where everyone feels like they walk away as a winner. You know, if you can make that happen. The way how you conduct yourself, where you communicate and how you structure the deal and stuff like that. And I think that statement puts that, you know, beautifully.

Speaker B: Life. We really appreciate you coming on the show today and giving us some time to chat about public. Thank you, man.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Thank you.