E05: Kevin Kang - Crypto Cards & Surviving Crises

Speaker A: We didn't exactly know what we were doing when we first started fundraising. We didn't have a real product. It was just Darren and myself and we had like a part time engineer that was based in Vietnam and we just drew mock ups of what we envisioned that web app to be. We were shut down by uh, one of the largest, uh, I would say card issuers in the world. Um, specifically American Express. I think we were the largest American Express merchant in apac. We came very close to shutting down because it represented a significant, uh, portion of our volume. You just have to try like 90% of the things that we do don't work out, but you're never gonna find that 10% of things that actually work if you don't learn by doing. You really do have to be this eternal optimist.

Speaker B: Hi everybody and welcome to a new episode of True Founder Stories, a show where we discuss founders, personal backgrounds and talk about fintech, AI and cross border expansion. My name is Felix and I'm your host for this show. With me today is Kevin Kang, one of the co founders of REAP. REAP provides global financial infrastructure powered by stablecoins and the company has raised over US$17 million in equity funding until today. Kevin, thanks for being here today.

Speaker A: Thanks Felix. Very nice to be here.

Speaker B: Kevin, you were born in China and actually moved to Canada when you were just six years old. What are some of the memories that you have from the time of being an immigrant in Canada?

Speaker A: I think it's shaped a lot of my worldview, um, throughout my childhood, adulthood, professional career, uh, being an immigrant, kind of a third culture kid, you really got to see a lot of different perspectives. So the place that I, uh, emigrated to, Toronto is actually a fairly multicultural place as well. So it wasn't necessarily just about me integrating into a new culture and getting new perspectives from my own point of view. I was also interfacing with other people who had very similar stories, who also came from different parts of the world. And it's really allowed me to kind of realize that everybody is similar despite where they come from, and given me a lot of comfort in the way that I operate today. You know, moving across the Pacific again, back here to Asia and you know, doing studies abroad in Europe. So it's given me a lot of uh, I would say confidence and relatability and empathy for people that I work with and people I interact with on a day to day basis.

Speaker B: What was your upbringing like? What were some of the emotions that you, that you faced when you were moving to Canada?

Speaker A: I was young, so obviously there's lots of, uh, emotions and initial resistance because change is tough on a six year old. But I think looking back now, it actually gave me a lot of the perspectives that's allowed me to be confident in what I do. Right. Um, and having different perspectives is one of the most important skills that I would say, um, has been demanded of me as a founder over the last seven years in which we've operated reap, uh, because it really allows you to think about problems differently from different lenses and unique insights. Oftentimes is what leads to different execution, different ways of solving customer problems. And, um, I think that's why I feel it's such a deep, ingrained part of me, um, and why I talk about it a lot. Right. I feel like everybody should get the opportunity to be able to see things from different perspectives, different cultures and, uh, different ways of operating.

Speaker B: Right. And you actually met your current co founder, Darren, in middle school, so quite a while back.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, maybe. Can you walk us through what was it like meeting him and what was that friendship like?

Speaker A: The first day of middle school where we had the same class together, I was just like, hey, this guy seems pretty interesting, um, you know, someone that I could hang out with. Um, but over time, uh, you really start to see the similarities in the way of thinking and the way that we can compliment each other. And that's why we really became best friends very quickly. And throughout the years, uh, and through different stages of our lives and careers, we've been able to kind of interplay with each other in terms of, hey, I have a perspective that you might not have, or you might have a perspective that I might not have, and complement each other in a way where it allowed both of us to grow, you know, towards the right direction. So, uh, when it came time for us to start, uh, a business together in 2018, uh, it just made a lot of natural, organic sense, um, because I think he has seen a, uh, part of the world that I haven't seen. So his background comes from more of the tech side, having previously worked at Stripe in its early days in San Francisco and subsequently Singapore. And I come more from the traditional finance background, uh, where I started my career in investment banking and then did investment for a little while and having done an MBA as well. So we felt like there was a lot of natural complementarity. And, uh, going back to our original middle school days, I think we were also very, just open and honest with each other. Right. Because of the history, because of the way that we know, we can say, um, anything to each other. Uh, it just made a lot of sense. So that's why we became fast friends. Uh, we related a lot to each other because of our cultural background and upbringing. Uh, but ultimately it's about uh, where we saw the relationship taking us forward professionally and how we can play off of each other to uh, get the best of both worlds.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you talked about your early career in investment banking as well as private equity, and you also did an MBA at Insead. What ultimately pulled you into entrepreneurship?

Speaker A: I think it was a combination of personal curiosity as well as really good timing, as well as um, Darren, my co founder, being a longtime friend. So it was an overlap of many different factors and maybe I can go through them one by one. Maybe I'll start first with my professional career and how that informed my future aspirations. You talked about investment, uh, banks, you talked about private equity funds. Um, I think a lot of my classmates at Insead also had similar experiences coming up in professional services, whether that be consulting, financial services. And while that was an extremely valuable kind of learning grounds for me, I never felt um, a true ownership in some of those positions. Yes, you're working with big names, you're working with big deals, big numbers. But I never had the opportunity to feel like I was in control or able to make any of these significant decisions on my own. So it's always been a question mark for me while I was going through that part of my career and professional development. And uh, while at Insead, I got exposed a little bit more to people who have that kind of experience. Going through it and uh, just made me feel like it was something I wanted to try. And specifically, uh, with my uh, co founder Darren, he's done a previous startup before, so while I was working uh, at an investment bank, he actually started his first uh, startup back in Toronto while we were still roommates. So even though I wasn't officially involved, uh, in that first startup that he started, I got to observe a lot about what it meant to be a founder.

Speaker B: Of course, in Insead, there's only a very small fraction of people going into entrepreneurship. It's a fair part. But actually most people of course pursue consulting or other professional services businesses. Was there a moment where you were tempted by the safety of the career and the salary of taking that path?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So this is probably that second piece that I was talking about which is more about um, the motivation behind it. Right. Kind of the professional motivation. So while all of my classmates were going through the case study interviews, um, Talking to the mbbs of the world, I felt the pull for sure because it felt like a safe way to continue my career. And after, ah, an mba, financially it would be quite good to land a safe job for at least the next few years. But uh, I think the personal interests just outweigh that. And I'll tell you a little bit about how Darren um, originally approached me with this idea. I was going through the recruitment process, I had a few offers on the table already from um, investment firms, from private equity funds, from some consulting opportunities. But Darren came to me and originally asked me to bounce a few ideas off of uh, off of me for something that he wanted to start. And he came to me, he's like, hey, look, I see this problem in the market and here's where my domain expertise comes into play. Uh, I've observed all of these things at Stripe in Singapore where I've been trying to push out this product. What do you think about it? So originally I was purely um, doing this out of like a consultative, you know, being a friend type of um, position like M. Oh, maybe this could use a little work maybe to sharpen your, your problem statement here a little bit. Uh, this is what you should talk to investors about. Maybe this will get some interested. And through that process I found myself really getting bought into that idea.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then eventually he was just like, why don't you join me? Right. Like you seem to have gotten a lot more context and some of the questions you're asking are, I would say relevant and given the complementarity that we know of each other, it would be a uh, pretty good partnership. Yeah. And uh, he convinced me that way. Right. And I knew that I would work well with him. And through that, uh, that's how the original company was formed and started.

Speaker B: Now what's the original idea for reap and how did it change over time?

Speaker A: The original idea was quite different from what we're doing today. Uh, the original idea was built on the premise that I um, think software products like a Stripe or these type of API driven, um, sales were a lot more difficult in this part of the world compared to let's say like a Silicon Valley where developer resources were abundant within the organizations that you're trying to sell to here. They saw a lot of that investment as a cost center. And this is some um, learnings that Darren has taken away from his previous position and decided how can we turn that on its head? How can we use uh, this as an opportunity? So the original idea was to work with payers People who had credit, uh, cards as a payment method, but didn't have recipients that had the capability of receiving cards. Business models such as Stripe traditionally worked on relying on the acceptance side of the merchant side to be able to take cards in and they would integrate these payment gateway solutions. But what we said was, what if we aggregated that and worked with businesses that had access to corporate cards, we could process it, grab the funds and then do a bank transfer to the other side. So suppliers, employees didn't need to integrate a Stripe per se, but with just a bank account they can receive funds from their payers, um, directly. That was the original idea, uh, obviously quite different, but I think there was a lot of moments that we took from learning from our customers and learning from the dynamics of the market that led to a variety of pivots to where we are today as a business.

Speaker B: Right. Um, maybe let's talk about the first fundraise first, because I'm assuming that was based on that model.

Speaker A: Right? Yeah.

Speaker B: What was that process like for you guys?

Speaker A: We didn't exactly know what we were doing. I mean, I think I've seen it from the investor side, but at much larger scales. So for a startup company of just Darren and myself, it was a completely different game from what I was used to. Um, some of the traditional stuff that you would pitch in, bigger fundraise pitch decks were just not as relevant. So we quickly realized that the idea itself is not the biggest thing. Especially with some of the early stage investors that we were talking to in those meetings, we realized what they were looking at was mostly us. Uh, right. What were some of the qualities that would make us the right people to go and execute not just this current idea, but any ideas that may come our way. And that was really exciting for me because, um, it meant there was a lot of possibilities. Whatever the idea you put in front of them, you're not necessarily constrained by, was just a plan. And it really depended on how well you can formulate that plan, you can communicate that plan, turn it into something tangible and real. I still remember when we first started fundraising, we didn't have a real product. It was just Darren and myself and we had like a part time engineer that was based in Vietnam and we just drew mockups of what we envisioned that web app to be. Yeah, um, I'm not sure if people still remember, but there used to be this mock up tool called Balsamiq.

Speaker B: I mean now it's way easier with lovableboat and all this stuff.

Speaker A: Exactly. Like people don't even use that anymore. That's how, I guess old we are in terms of the company that we built. But we just drew stuff up on Balsamiq and we drew diagrams and flowcharts on how it might actually work. And what we did was took that out to two potential customers, not even real customers, knocked on their door and said, would you use this? I just sat down with them with the accounting team, with the finance team, and we got enough people interested for them to sign MOUs with us, whatever that means. Um, and we took those MOUs and showed that to potential investors. We're like, we have interest. So it really was not so much about the actual business itself in that very first round. It's really about, hey, can you get this done? Can you formulate that plan? Can you go out and execute? And I like to think that was the reason we were at least somewhat successful in raising a little bit of money, um, beyond just me and Darren kind of showing off our CVS and things like that.

Speaker B: Right. And you mentioned that you and Darren are actually complimentary people. What's your superpower and what is his superpower?

Speaker A: I would say he's definitely the more aggressive, uh, visionary one. I'm the one who tries to pull him back a little bit and be a little bit more realistic. Oftentimes, I think he believes, he truly believes that anything is possible. And I think I share that belief with him. But I will then evaluate and ask the right questions to bring it back to what is reasonably possible today. Right, so a few qualifiers there. Um, and he often likes to have big ideas, um, tries to break things, tries to push people to beyond the boundaries of what is actually the conventional way of doing things. And I try to be a little bit more detail oriented and figure out, hey, here are the plans in terms of the leadership team that we have today. The way of how we manage and operate the business has been compared to him being more of the hammer approach. Go out and break things. And I try to be the scalpel, to be a little bit more precise and poor, more accurate in terms of how we want to achieve these things. And you need both. Right. I think you cannot be too safe, nor can you be too brash and too abrasive. And that's the way that we balance each other today.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's great. And I think some of the, uh, teams also in our portfolio show those traits in a very complementary way. I think it's a super powerful combination of skill sets. I think your early investors, obviously, they believed in you very early when you just had some mock ups and mous and obviously they made the right choice at the time they invested. What actually makes a great early stage investor in your view?

Speaker A: I think an early stage investor is um, someone who's going to be a long term partner for us. We had a lot of early stage funds that have just gone with us no matter which way we took the direction of the business. So they almost themselves have to be in that founder mentality being okay with adapting with certain things. And oftentimes we find that to be ex operators or uh, people who have worked at early stage companies and they just understand, uh, and empathize with the things that we have to go through. So we don't feel shy, we don't feel like we need to present this embellished layer of how well the business is actually going with the investors that we really trust. So there's a high degree of psychological safety, there's high degree of trust and uh, then from there there's a high degree of collaboration because once you get all of the context and information out into the air, they are on your team essentially. Right. So that everybody is part of this problem now and they can lend their brain power, lend their network, lend their resources and it's not just about the money that they put in anymore. That's what makes a really good early stage investor, at least from our view.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense in the, in the best state of things you should be able to share the bad news and in reverse you should get the hard truths from your investor that actually helps change your business without any, you know, without any stigma. I guess.

Speaker A: When we were building our company we really wanted to build a strong feedback culture. Right. And it actually started with some of our investors because before we had employees they were technically our board, our uh, advisors. And when they were able to give us effective feedback, it actually made us realize how we can then do it to the people that joins the company, our future investors. Um, it really helped us build uh, a way to that psychological trust and psychological safety.

Speaker B: Yeah. And those investors of course went with you when you did a couple of pivots to the business that reap is today.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What were those pivots like and what, what does the business look like now?

Speaker A: So the original business idea was to be this card merchant aggregator. Take card payments on behalf of the payer and then send funds via whatever bank transfer check cash means to the receiving side. But eventually what we realized was that there was a bit of a ceiling to that because we didn't ultimately control the payment method, the cards that the businesses were using. So there were um, bank issued corporate cards, the American expresses of the world. But sometimes they had limitations. A lot of these customers were like, oh, we like your product, we like paying via this payment method. But our card doesn't allow us to do what we want it to do. So we thought about what is the next step of that, like how do we de bottleneck that particular um, problem. So we thought about issuing our own cards. And uh, initially we tried to talk to all the big banks and partners like hey, can we co brand with you? Can we do something together? Nobody wanted to work with us. And to be fair, look, it'll be cannibalizing their own business. Why would you want to co brand with a fintech when you can just go sell directly to your businesses? And eventually what happened was we decided to go that path ourselves. And we got a principal issuance license with Visa based out of Hong Kong. We started issuing corporate cards. We started building this entire product suite where you had access to the cards as well as the payment platforms that supported all the payments on the corporate expenses side. So that's how we first moved into issuance and vertically integrated. And then eventually we hit another ceiling which was, hey, we're starting to hit uh, kind of the limitations of the um, addressable market in Hong Kong and Singapore where we were finding these SMEs and businesses. How do we expand that target addressable market? And what we realized was that there were segments of power users on our web app dashboard who are essentially leveraging our capabilities around card issuance and payments not for their own uses, but for like downstream third party use cases. They were generating card numbers to buy concert tickets and reselling those tickets to other people. They were generating card numbers for um, their downstream customers, uh, their employees. There's a variety of different use cases that we thought were extremely platform focused as opposed to it for their internal expenses. So we thought about how do we productize that? Let's explore that a little bit. We explored a few verticals around travel. So online travel agencies is a very strong group of uh, power users around virtual cards. We explored content, uh, streaming platforms where they have uh, freelancers on their platform that they can utilize this to provide a payment method to their downstream content creators. We explored Web3 centralized exchanges that had a uh, captive audience of people who are trading on these platforms but wanted a card solution attached to them. And all of these things had varying degrees of success. But what we Found was that in the Web3 segment there were a lot of these financial platforms like trading platforms, digital wallets, neo banking use cases that fit really well with what we were doing. So we opened up our APIs, we allowed them to settle with us directly using stablecoins because that was the treasury method that they had. And we've created this entirely stablecoin native, uh, card issuance and payment solutions on top of what we previously built, uh, in the traditional fiat, um, infrastructure. So we were able to bridge that gap and it allowed us to start serving a larger group of global financial platforms, global neobanks that were thinking about leveraging stablecoins in a very different way, uh, compared to how people just think about crypto.

Speaker B: So is that part of your business, your core focus now?

Speaker A: Absolutely it is. What we found through a variety of these pivots is that stablecoins has become this technology layer that has allowed us to connect various different parts of the world. Right. And we fundamentally believe it's a more borderless, seamless Internet native way of moving value and moving money and it provides a way for people in emerging market regions to access financial services that historically they've never had access to. So going back to when we first started adopting this technology, we found fintech platforms, neo banks that wanted to issue stablecoin backed cards into regions that they weren't able to find card issuance service providers domestically and locally. So our whole thesis became that if you can't find it locally then where are you going to get these capabilities from? We wanted to be effectively a financial services exporter utilizing stablecoin Rails. It allowed us to distribute card issuance capabilities, cross border money movement capabilities into some of these emerging markets and they would settle seamlessly with us, we would be a centralized service provider. But then they can build the next iteration of neo banks such as a Revolut or an N26, uh, leveraging something uh, that is completely decentralized in Hong Kong and Singapore and the financial hubs of the world.

Speaker B: Right. And of course stablecoins have huge benefits when it comes to speed and cost of transfers and generally making the financial system more efficient. They also bring benefits to a certain target group which actually sort of uses these new rails to commit business. And the flows that happen are not always clean. Right. How do you make sure as a company that the flows stay clean on reap?

Speaker A: So first and foremost I think um, regulation and kyc, aml, all of these things are at the forefront of what we do. Right. Uh, here at reap the those are the fundamental ingredients for us to be able to build proper products on the card payment side and the kind of the cross border remittances side. That being said, I think we have to first and foremost think about this as a technology. There's many different ways that you can potentially utilize this particular technology. And uh, yes, in certain instances, if you think about cryptography, blockchain, uh, decentralized finance, you are able to uh, obfate or anonymize certain things to prevent people from knowing your true intentions behind the money movement. That being said, in terms of public blockchains, ledgers, you are also able to replicate all of the necessary steps and more of what is actually required from a traditional money movement capability perspective. So the information that you're passing through for kyc, verifying source of funds, doing AML checks, you can apply it to this new network that we're building on top of blockchains. If you do that the right way, then you can also have a similar outcome where the traditional financial systems are uh, regulated in that particular way. Uh, the way that I see it is the same as the Internet. You can utilize the Internet in a certain way which is conducive to gray or black activities. There's a dark web, people do gambling, people do adult. There's various different things that you can do there. But you can also utilize it for more legitimate purposes. And you can apply regulation, you can apply stringent rules to that particular technology. And the same way that I think about this, which is this is a network, right? And payments and money movement fundamentally is a glorified messaging system. It's about what messages do you want to pass through and not pass through. So if we take an approach of we want to be above board on everything and we want to pass through the relevant information, the correct KYC documents, uh, all of the data points that relates to clean and transparent money transfer, we can do that and we are doing that. And I think once we get to that certain standard, we're able to adopt this as an overall network upgrade for money movement globally.

Speaker B: Right? Of course building this business has a lot of regulatory challenges, but it also has business challenges and execution challenges. What was maybe the closest you ever came to shutting down the company?

Speaker A: So there's been a lot of challenges, uh, there's been a lot of interesting moments. I um, think I can bring you back to one moment when we, this was right before we decided to go into card issuance. Uh, we were shut down by uh, one of the largest, uh, I would say card Issuers in the world, um, specifically American Express, because of the activities that we were doing on accepting payments from these cards and sending the funds out on the other side. We were essentially processing invoice payments right, from these cards. They will tell us, hey, there's an invoice I want to pay. We'd be able to draw the funds out from the card because we, we were the merchant on record and we will send the funds through to the suppliers that they were paying to. And because of this aggregation and the amount of B2B payments we were processing, at one point in time, I think we were the largest American Express merchant in apac, number one, because the acceptance for Amex is not that high everywhere else. The second piece is that we were processing large business transactions. Right. So we weren't aggregating small individual consumer transactions. And eventually, uh, the issuer had certain problems with us and this particular business model. While we were increasing the acceptance of their cards and processing more flows and generate more revenue for them because of the flows, there was also an element of them not knowing exactly where the end destination merchants were being paid. Because we were the merchant of record, we were the ones sending the funds through to the end suppliers or the end employees that the cardholders are trying to pay. As a result, uh, they've decided that we should no longer be a merchant that is capable of accepting, uh, American Express cards. Uh, we came very close to shutting down because it represented a significant portion, uh, of our volume. It also represented a potential legal risk for us, um, not to go into specifics. There were a lot of considerations and a lot of, uh, uncertainty at that moment for our business. But eventually this also. There's a silver lining to this, which is we realized we have no control over the cards that were being issued. And the issuers, at the end of the day, had the ultimate say on who gets one of their cars and how those cars are ultimately used. And that led us to thinking about what if we became the issuer? So that led that question, that led to the pivot of going into principal, uh, member card issuance. And that's how we got there. So there was that existential moment where we thought, oh, this business might not work and might have to shut down. But we were able to turn that into an advantage and kind of a different product roadmap that we pursued after the incident.

Speaker B: Yeah. Now, of course, you've known your co founder, Darren, for a pretty long time. Um, how do you go through these moments and especially how do you deal with conflicts?

Speaker A: So we have pretty open and candid discussions and arguments, um, between the two of us, uh, because we do have that trust and knowing how we work with each other across over 20 years of relationship. Right. Um, and the way that we deal with it is that we can have strong opinions, we can have our arguments. We never make it personal, but that doesn't mean it can't get heated. We allocate rules and responsibilities beforehand. So this is your domain of expertise. This is my domain expertise. Let's have our disagreements, let's present our arguments. But at the end of the day, if there's an impasse, if this was pre agreed upon and is part of your remit, you will make the final say. I will disagree, but I will commit to your decisions. Uh, when we first started the business, we used to do this a lot in front of the entire team. Uh, we didn't have an office where we can just go and talk it out ourselves. So it presented, um, even though we knew we were having a not personal argument and disagreement, it may not have seemed as such to the team that we were working with.

Speaker B: What was the reaction of the team?

Speaker A: So I mean, as you can imagine, if the two co founders are having a very heated argument about something, it could be implied or inferred that, uh, you know, there's co founder attention, they're gonna break up, that the business is not gonna succeed. But at the end of the day, me and Darren were also roommates in those early days of the business. So we had to put down our arguments, decide to go home, have dinner, and then come back and do the same thing again the next day.

Speaker B: But like a married couple.

Speaker A: Like a married couple. But eventually we realized the psychological impact that had on people who were observing the fights. So we've decided, like a married couple, don't fight in front of the people who are working with you, don't fight in front of the kids. Was, was the principle that we eventually decided to follow.

Speaker B: And you actually told me when we talked about your biggest mistakes as a founder. Right. You actually mentioned not hiring faster throughout the journey of the company. When did you realize that?

Speaker A: I think we've always known that we're very slow hires. Um, in the beginning it was more intentional. Right. So we saw the, the benefits of not hiring very fast, which was we put a lot of scrutiny on the people we initially bring into the company. We thought about talent and hiring people as a very path dependent thing. If you make sure that the first group of hire that you bring into the company are the right Cultural fit. They're the a players that you need them to be. And they can then disseminate that culture that uh, those values, the way of working to the next generation, next iterations of hires. So we wanted to maintain that fidelity of what me and Darren believed in, the culture that we wanted to build by hiring slower, by making sure we had the right people. But we didn't recognize the downsides of that right away. Right? Which was we could have specialized a lot more, we could have like diversified. We didn't have to handle so many responsibilities, uh, up front between Darren and myself. And we could have had a lot more experts come in, provide their own point of view instead of taking it upon ourselves. And I think that would have allowed the company to grow a lot faster, to iterate a lot faster. Of course, we do realize that probably meant we would have sacrificed a little bit of that fidelity from, uh, the successive generations of hiring that we brought into the company. But I think that trade off could have been made and we would still have been equally or probably even more successful than we are today.

Speaker B: How's your hiring going now, given that your team is actually relatively large already?

Speaker A: It is relatively large already. I think we're over 250 people globally. I think some of the benefits that I mentioned about hiring slowly in the beginning has played out right. Uh, we delegate a lot of these decisions to our team now. We don't sit in on every single one of these interview and hiring decisions anymore. We're not like, I know there are some companies out there, right, where the founders are involved until a thousand employees, we don't do that. But at the same time we have a high degree of trust about team who are hiring, who have the capabilities of making this decision. So I still find that the culture fidelity and the talent fidelity is still relatively high, um, because there's very low loss of signal in every successive generation of hiring that we're seeing. That being said, you know, we, we still, I think that the team is fairly dynamic and uh, there's going to be a lot of evolutions and reorganizations and how people contribute to the success of the business, especially now that we're expanding into different geographic locations. So we're always involved in these key node hiring decisions where it becomes once again extremely path dependent. If you have the right person, the next people will also be the right people. At the end of the day, we believe that good people hire good people. So I think that's why, um, we have this particular setup around how we

Speaker B: build the team and did you ever actually get to write down your company values? Is that something that you focus on during interviews?

Speaker A: It is internally, for how we evaluate people. So, uh, when we first started the company, it was Darren, myself and that part time engineer in Vietnam. We actually went to Vietnam to visit him and we had our first official, I guess company off site, if you can call it that, and we locked ourselves in an Airbnb and all three of us wrote down what mattered to us most, like top 10 things. And we all threw it into a box, shook it up, and then put them across, uh, this whiteboard on where they might be grouped together. So based on all of those things, we grouped together and found the five most important things for us. And those have been essentially our company values that, um, we strive for. And, uh, specifically we call them behaviors because they're a little bit more easier to recognize compared to just values.

Speaker B: Fully agree.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's evolved a lot. Right. And I think every time that you hire someone, yes, you're looking for people who fit those values and behaviors that you're looking for, but they're always going to bring something new to the table. So I think about it as this Venn diagram where the majority of it, uh, overlaps when you bring in someone new, someone culturally impactful to the company, but they'll have some parts of them that is maybe an extension of what you originally had. And the bigger that you get, the more overlaps that you have, but the more on the out fringes of that Venn diagram that you all have as well. So your overall company grows. And we want to make sure that we're not just making sure people conform to what we want. We also want the best of what they have to contribute to that overall culture that we're growing as a business.

Speaker B: Right. What's the most important value for you guys right now?

Speaker A: We always say anything is possible. I think this is something that we repeat over and over again. And it's something that, I mean, in practice and in reality, we know it's not necessarily true. But you have to start with that first. Right? You have to start with, yeah, of course we can do this and then work backwards from that to find the most practical and realistic solution. If you start from the fact that, no, I don't think this will work, and let's try and find a few ways the ceiling of where you can actually achieve and the ideas that you come up with are just fundamentally different.

Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think the goal that you're setting will always be the maximum that you can achieve. Uh, we kind of think of it the same way. For Kadan, one of the core values is aim for iconic. And that means surrounding yourself with the best people to come to the best outcome. And actually you have to, you have to work with the best to become the best over time. So it's definitely true with your company. You've gone through an unusual number of crises actually. You've lived through the Web3 market downturn in 2021. Um, you've survived Covid, basically. Um, you've also seen the Hong Kong protests, actually. What have you seen and learned from these events?

Speaker A: I think the old adage of what doesn't kill you, make you stronger actually does apply quite a lot. There are so many events that you really just have to believe there is this optimistic outcome on the other side. Right. Darren brought this concept over from, from Stripe. In its early days, I think Stripe had this ideal that they wanted to embody, which is Stripe is for optimists. And he says that a lot. He says that a lot, uh, when we're talking about things. And I think it's true, right. I think in order, it's not just for Stripe, but in order to be, be a founder and entrepreneur and going through crisis is, you really do have to be this eternal optimist. So Hong Kong protests, a lot of businesses were leaving. We weren't able to work with, uh, some retail folks who were essentially facing a lot of downturn. How do we adapt to that? We had to move towards more technology oriented companies, international companies. That Delta trading, that opened up payment rails, that opened up international expansion. Covid. I was supposed to come to Singapore for a five day work trip. I got stuck here. I couldn't go back to Hong Kong. I didn't, um, they shut their borders for almost like a year and a half. I opened up the Singapore office. We started learning how to work remotely. It's one of the reasons why we have 250 people globally. They're not all clustered in one particular city. It really allowed us to open up our talent strategy on finding the right people first before figuring out where they are in the world. The crypto funding downturn in 2021, everybody raised at enormously huge valuations. We didn't, we didn't get capital constraint. We didn't get, uh, that high hurdle that people had to meet. We were able to then eventually find our own way and, you know, be able to, um, you know, work very closely with our early stage investors and build a business that we thought was the Right. Business. To build all of these I want would say, yeah, they're probably silver linings now you think about it in retrospect. But you really have to be that optimist in the moment and believe in that anything is possible. Which is why I say it's so important for company values.

Speaker B: Right. Uh, what is one audacious goal that you have for reap?

Speaker A: I think longer term we're going to stop using this term of kind of Web three versus Web two fiat versus stablecoins, um, and it will become this closed loop type of ecosystem where it's simply just money movement. Right. And the way that I'm thinking about it is we are upgrading this network of money movement and financial services today. And what we're doing is we're applying this particular technology, stablecoin and blockchains, to certain legs of it, um, where money movement is the most inefficient. Uh, but at the same time there is still a lot of connectivity into the traditional Rails, as you call it. I think in the long term both us as well as a lot of other players in the industry have this shared common vision where if your counterparty is also accepting stablecoins, a digital representation of currency of value, and your uh, downstream counterparties are also accepting of that, there is no longer this need to move back to the traditional fiat layer. And if that's the case then we can upgrade the entirety of the network of money movement. No matter where you're sending, uh, from point A to point B, it's on this new digitally native Internet, native programmable rail. And because of that everybody benefits. Right. So that is probably a more longer term vision that I think will take a lot of time to realize. It takes regulation, it takes government participation, takes industry player participation, it takes trust from the consumers and the end users of this particular technology. But I think it's going to happen. I fundamentally believe that's going to happen because if you look at how fiat money works, it's also just a trust based system where you trust that if you take a banknote to the central bank or whatever government, they'll give you an equivalent amount of value. But um, yeah, that's probably my craziest idea that I have.

Speaker B: If it happens though, it's going to cannibalize all your card issuance revenues.

Speaker A: I think so, yes. So our long term view is uh, that let's say in three to five years and we're still just focusing on card issuance, we probably would have failed as a business. Right. Our whole goal is not to be beholden to one particular payment method. Our whole goal here is to be the technology that would make things flow better and make money movement more efficient and accessible, uh, from anywhere in the world. That being said, it's easy to start with this payment method because people have done the groundwork. There's huge amounts of acceptance for the card networks in the world. We're standing on shoulders of giants. But the next iteration has to be always forward looking and how can we get a better uh, experience out of that? So that's why I don't like this distinction of traditional fiat versus stablecoins Web two, Web three. I think every single iteration is just the next generation of technology. Right. There could be a Web 4.0, Web 5.0 and if you as a fintech payments infrastructure provider are not embracing of that, you're always just going to get stuck at one layer.

Speaker B: You have to move all the time. To close this conversation, what's one piece of advice that you wish you would have received earlier, uh, in your career,

Speaker A: for me personally is learn by doing. Um, it's a thing that we say a lot but sometimes it's hard to get over that mental hurdle and I didn't realize how powerful it was until I started my own business. Right. Which is everything is learned by doing, I'm learning by doing today. Right. Everything that um, I experienced, there's like so much change constantly and no one is going to necessarily going to have all the right answers for you because that means somebody else has done it before and you might not be uh, investing your time in the right areas if that's what you, you are doing. So a lot of things is just entirely up to you to go and try and not necessarily be afraid of the consequences of that failure. Um, another thing that we say a lot within the company is like, you just have to try. Like 90% of the things that we do don't work out. But you're never going to find that 10% of things that actually work if you don't learn by doing. Um, so yeah, that's something that I think uh, if I had to go back I would tell myself a lot earlier.

Speaker B: Done is better than perfect, right?

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Thanks so much Kevin for your time. Really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the questions.

Speaker B: Thanks everybody for tuning in and we'll see you next time.