Jake Gibson, the Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, gives a refreshing view of how FinTech is going to touch every part of the world. Jake discusses how the market downturn has impacted startups and gives a FinTech VC’s point of view on key Web3 trends.
Jake Gibson, the Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, gives a refreshing view of how FinTech is going to touch every part of the world. Jake discusses how the market downturn has impacted startups and gives a FinTech VC’s point of view on key Web3 trends.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
1:32 It's way too early to say anything like ‘FinTech is overdone’ or ‘FinTech is dead’.
13:50 Does a playbook exist for raising startup capital in the current market downturn?
19:48 Web 3: many entrepreneurs following the hype; investors looking for impact
23:27 Why ‘move fast and break things’ is not a good strategy for FinTech startups
The non-profit organizations Jake is passionate about: GiveWell
Jake Gibson is the Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV). Jake is one of the most active and most experienced FinTech venture capital investors. He's based in Silicon Valley and invests in very early-stage startups. Previously, he was an active angel investor and before that an investor at 500 FinTech. He is also the co-founder of NerdWallet, which is one of the earliest fintech startups. He served there as COO from 2010 to 2014. The personal finance company went public in 2021.
Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) is a Silicon Valley-based early-stage fintech-focused fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage companies globally. BTV is currently investing out of its second fund, driven by the “Everything is FinTech” theme. Companies in its portfolio include Unit, Salsa, Amitruck, Vitt, Creditbook, FarmRaise, CloudTrucks among others.
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[FinTech] It's not the kind of thing where you could go out and just start testing a product early on, because you can get into pretty serious legal trouble. So, there is a lot more zero to one work that goes into most FinTech companies than into your average consumer or B2B, SaaS.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur, a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host Gopi Rangan and I'm here with Jake Gibson. He's the Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures. He's one of the most active and most experienced FinTech venture capital investors. Jake is based in the Silicon valley and he invests in very early-stage startups. Previously, he was an active angel investor, was an investor at 500 FinTech and also the co-founder of NerdWallet, one of the earliest fintech startups.
Jake, welcome back to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Jake Gibson: Thanks for having me.
Gopi Rangan: Tell us about your new fund. You just closed a brand new fund and you have an amazing theme that FinTech is going to touch every part of the world. Jake, I want to hear a little more about your plans for the future at Better Tomorrow Ventures.
Jake Gibson: Yeah. Ever since our first fund, back in 2019, the cover of our pitch decks has always said "Everything is FinTech" because we have this view that finance is becoming technology and technology is permeating everything. So, it's only a matter of time before finance permeates everything. You hear stuff like this all the time with crypto people. This is exactly the sort of lines that they use to talk about what's going on in the blockchain space, but we don't believe that the blockchain or crypto is strictly necessary for this to become true. We just feel that as finance is moving from this world of being brick and mortar, paper, PDFs, emails, and hand-holding human processes, to being more programmable via all this new FinTech infrastructure and stuff, we feel like it's only a matter of time before that sort of software starts to permeate everything we do. And that we move more towards a customer-centric world instead of a product-centric world. Another way to think about this whole idea is that finance, in the past, has been, like I said, focused on products where you have a bank, that's this monolithic organization and they have one department that sells you checking accounts and maybe savings accounts. They have another department that will sell you a mortgage and other department that will sell you an auto loan.
And it's very focused on like let's create products for the mass market and they just spend a bunch of money on marketing to get them in front of as many people as possible, versus like, I have tailored this product specifically to you and your situation and I'm going to give it to you in the context in which it actually matters and solve a very unique problem for you, which is the way the internet works. All of the technology products that we use have that ladder customer focus. The financial industry still seems to be stuck in this product-focused world. So, as financial products become more programmable and as we have more and more financial infrastructure that lowers the barriers to building these sorts of products, we think that we're going to start to see finance pop-up more contextually for a user when they're facing a certain problem, or when they're in a certain application and present you with a way to pay a way to save money, a way to kind of send or deliver money, a way to borrow money, or what have you, the space specifically on the context in which you're in. If you're a Shopify seller, for example, and you spend your whole life on Shopify managing your business, there's no reason why your bank accounts itself should be over at Wells Fargo, totally disconnected from the rest of your life, when Shopify could offer you a business bank account. They know a lot more about your business than Wells Fargo does and can give you working capital loans and things like that, or loan money to you against your inventory, just keep it all contained into one model. That, generally speaking, is how we think the financial world is starting to trend.
Gopi Rangan: How true is that thesis "Everything is FinTech" today, compared to when you started with that thesis, when you founded Better Tomorrow Ventures? I understand that in the financial services world, companies are stuck in stone age. A lot of digital transformation is waiting to happen, even on the far end of consumer interface. Pretty much every sector within financial services - payments, investing, banking, insurance; is transforming. I'm curious to see if it played out the way you expected when you started.
Jake Gibson: Yeah. I mean, it certainly caught on. At least in terms of mind share it has played out a lot more quickly than I would have expected. When Sheel and I first started putting together the strategy for the fund, we had this idea about embedded FinTech and " Everything is FinTech" from some of the stuff that we had seen playing out in our prior investments. At the time we thought it was novel, but then within a few months after I started to pitch this, you see Andreessen talking to their LPs about it at their annual meeting, and then writing a bunch of public content about it. Matt Harris from Bain Capital comes out with a bunch of content and talking about the fourth platform and it became a really buzzy thing very quickly. There was a while there in 2020 and 2021 when all you had to do is basically write FinTech infrastructure on a napkin and you could raise money from anybody you wanted to. At least that's how it felt.
We thought we'd have a few years to plant our seeds and start to build a strategy around this idea, but it all played out a lot quicker.. In terms of actual usage and how it's changing outcomes for the end users, it's still very early. Even our portfolio company, Unit, which is the first investment we made out of Fund One (they're kind of the cornerstone of this whole strategy for us. It's a banking-as-a-service platform, and we've also invested in a bunch of companies that are Unit customers), they've achieved amazing things in the last few years, and they have a ton of customers, but in the grand scheme of things, when you look at the size of the banking industry, or even just the size of the commercial banking industry, and then you look at the transaction volumes that Unit manages, there's still a long way to go for us to prove that this thesis is going to play out in a meaningful way.
Gopi Rangan: The mind share part is true. More people are paying attention to FinTech. But solution-wise, we're still a long way to solving many important problems. So you feel like we haven't reached peak FinTech yet. Is that right?
Jake Gibson: No. Definitely not.
Gopi Rangan: But there are so many VCs focusing on FinTech and pretty much every VC firm is investing in FinTech these days. Haven't we reached peak FinTech?
Jake Gibson: Financial services is something like 25% of global GDP. We have barely begun to scratch the surface in terms of technology adoption within the industry and in terms of disrupting any of the business models of the traditional financial sector. I would also say that when we were investing our last fund, 500 FinTech, back in 2016 and 2017, everybody thought FinTech was done, and that the previous wave of the lending clubs of the world had proven that there weren't the same venture outcomes in FinTech or in financial services as there were in the rest of tech, and that FinTech was dead. It doesn't work, it's not venture-backable bla bla bla.
We've made a ton of money investing at that time because we had our pick of amazing FinTech companies when we were building that accelerator because nobody else wanted to invest in it. Then, even when we were starting to talk about our fund in 2018, then when we really started pitching in 2019, it seems crazy to say this now, but we had a bunch of LPs telling us even towards the end of 2019, FinTech is not going to support a standalone seed fund. They asked, "isn't FinTech played out?" so on and so forth. The same sort of things we were hearing that back in 2019, how laughable is that after we saw what happened in 2020 and 2021, people were telling us this right when we started to see some of the biggest exits in FinTech history happened at the end of 2019 and early 2020 and then it just accelerated from there right when people are thinking that FinTech was dead. I still think we have a long way to go. Like I was saying before it's such a huge part of the global economy and it's still relatively negligible in terms of overall investment from the venture side relative to the size of the potential outcomes.
We've also been hearing for at least 12 years now that tech was in a bubble and that's true. There were too many funds, too much capital chasing too few opportunities. But it continued to accelerate for more than a decade. We did finally get a bit of a downturn here at the end of last year and early this year, but you would have had to be wrong and miss out on a shit ton of gains for a very long period of time in order to be able to now pat yourself on the back and say "I was right. It was a bubble." I think it's way too early to say anything like FinTech is overdone or FinTech is dead.
Gopi Rangan: In the short term, we might see ups and downs like this, but in the long term, there is so much transformation waiting to happen. We're still, like you said earlier, changing existing infrastructure from pen and paper and fax machines to digital solutions. We don't even need more advanced solutions like blockchain and other. But if you look at the opportunities that will be opened up by advanced technologies, that's even bigger in the future. This is very very exciting indeed. Can you give examples of companies and sectors where you focus your investments? You mentioned earlier that banking-as-a-service is one area you started with. What are some areas that are important for you?
Jake Gibson: We tend not to be super thesis driven. So, we just try to meet all the best founders we can and hope that they can show us something new and interesting in the world that we haven't seen before. I don't think that I'm nearly creative enough to identify the opportunities ahead of time or identify the most interesting sectors I ought to be investing in ahead of time. I really lean on the founders.
Gopi Rangan: This is refreshing. Many VC firms start with like, "here's my thesis. This is what I'm looking for."
Jake Gibson: We certainly have some high-level ideas but we're not too married to them.
Gopi Rangan: You can't be too tied to certain types of patterns or certain areas because this is about finding things that didn't exist before. You have to leave it up to the founders to discover new topics we haven't seen before. It's very interesting. I'm glad that you and I are aligned. I don't see that happening often in the venture world.
Jake Gibson: Yeah, it's funny because we get this question all the time from LPs and others: "What are some sectors that you're not excited about or that you think other people are way too excited about but you aren't?" Every time we come up with this answer to the question: "We ended up backing a company in that space, anyway; for the most part because we meet the right founder who convinces us that they have a different approach, a different product or something along those lines. We just find somebody that we feel like we absolutely have to back or they end up pivoting into a space that we aren't super excited about, but then really crushing it. So we try not to be too married to the ideas."
Gopi Rangan: I want to ask you about what's happening in the world today, but can you give a few examples of startups you've invested in and then we'll jump into trends today.
How did you meet the founders? How do you form opinion?
Jake Gibson: Yeah. I mentioned Unit already, so I'll piggyback off that one because it's an interesting story.
The founder of Unit was an EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) who worked with us at 500 FinTech while we were still building that accelerator and we spent a couple of years with him. He helped out a ton of our portfolio companies and everybody loved him. We loved working with him. He had previously built a company called Liberate in Israel, which was like a FX brokerage in a box sort of FinTech infrastructure play, way ahead of the hype now anyway, and had left with his current co-founder a few years ago when it was time for management change. They'd been there for a long time and he just decided to move.
So, he was spending his time hanging out with us and helping other portfolio companies. We knew that at some point he was going to want to start something new and we always told him that we want to be a part of it. In 2019, he started bouncing some ideas off the wall and we, Sheel especially, started to steer him more towards like, "let's just make sure it's something in FinTech so that we can back you. We're about to go raise this fund. We really want to work with you and we'd love to make this the first real bet out of our new fund." Sheel even went out to Israel and spent a bunch of time with them brainstorming ideas and white boarding, connecting him with banks and other people in the FinTech space. Ultimately, we helped him triangulate towards this idea of banking-as-a-service because we had this whole idea around embedded FinTech and FinTech infrastructure. We didn't think that any of the existing banking-as-a-service players had really captured significant market share. They hadn't really demonstrated that there was a real market here and so we wanted to help fund a new player to go do this and then build an ecosystem around them. That's what they ended up doing and it ended up being the first investment out of our first fund.
Gopi Rangan: You met the founder even before he knew he wanted to start a company in this space.
Jake Gibson: Yeah, that's one of the things that we like to do. I mean we were founders at one point. We're still kind of founders. I mean, starting a new venture fund, while not nearly as hard as building a hyper-growth tech company, it really does put you back in the founder seat and to some extent puts you back in the operator's seat. And we love building. We like working on cool ideas with cool people and so we meet people all the time where we just help them brainstorm ideas, help connect them with people in the industry even if they're not fundraising or it's not something that we're going to be super involved in just yet. We just like to work with people and be part of that zero to one process. That's very much a part of how we invest. We as well spend enough time with these people and a lot of times they come back and say, "Hey, that was really helpful. I landed on this idea. You all always ask really good questions. You all were really helpful even before I was fundraising. I'd love to get you involved."...and it turns into a proper fundraising process.
When we were doing 500 FinTech, a lot of what we did was more or less like incubating businesses and Itai was one of our EIRs. We had something like seven or eight EIRs over the years, all of whom either ended up starting something or joining one of our companies that we were helping start. And then there was me, I was the first EIR and became Sheel's partner. We always had this vision that we want to do something similar with BTV. It's been hard to have the bandwidth. I think we need a bigger team and a more dedicated strategy for this, but we would love to continue incubating things like this or build another accelerator focused on FinTech just to get our hands dirty at those super early zero to one stages again and help people come up with ideas and get them off the ground. It's something that's always been really appealing to us.
Gopi Rangan: You invest in pre-seed and seed stages, like quite early in the first round of funding. When Unit started in 2019, the world was different. How do you see the market changing? Have your portfolio companies seen any impact because of the downturn that we're in right now? Is fundraising easier for later rounds of funding for your portfolio companies?
Jake Gibson: There's definitely been an impact across the entire industry, not just within our portfolio, but just from talking to VCs at various ages, other seed investors, series A investors and even some of the later-stage growth investors. We have a bunch of them who are LPs of ours. We have a bunch of them were just friends that we invest with or are on boards with or what have you. It's pretty clear that across the landscape we're in a different world now than we were even six months ago. There's very much a 'wait and see' feeling in the VC world at every stage. Public markets got hit pretty hard and then a war started and people are skittish that LPs are going to start getting nervous and not deploying capital as quickly.
So, a lot of these funds that have been raising a ton of capital year after year after year are going to come up for their next re-up cycle and who knows what's going to happen. We're hearing that a lot of the later stage investors who are propping up a lot of what was going on over the last couple of years have cut their investments by something like 50% since the beginning of this year.
Gopi Rangan: Really? That's significant.
Jake Gibson: Yeah. That's what we're hearing. And that actually all filters down to what we're seeing now, which is rounds are definitely still getting done. Hot companies who already had relationships with certain investors, or if you were the kind of company where people are already circling the hoop, trying to find a way to invest in you, you are still able to raise capital now. The valuation might be lower, but you are definitely still able to raise capital. Whereas, anybody who's on the margin is getting dragged along, in a sense. So, diligence cycles are much longer now. You're gonna ask a lot more questions. You're getting a lot more VCs dragging their feet and waiting to see what's going to happen. You're seeing less of people like really wanting to be the price setters and really make the first move and put the first term sheet down rather than just maximizing their own optionality and sitting on their hands until there's something that really forces their hand, and then I think everybody's waiting for valuation expectations to come back a little bit. So, especially with this last YC batch, around that period of time people at the seed stage hadn't quite realized that public markets and later stage stuff is actually going to filter down to seed, at some point. People were still very much trying to raise at valuations that were more like early 2021 valuations. We have just been sitting here waiting for that to retrace and knew that it would happen. And as we've been pitched companies that are raising at crazy high 2021 foot evaluation, we've drawn a hard line on it and it's happening.
Gopi Rangan: Have you slowed at your pace of investment?
Jake Gibson: Yes. The bar for us is higher. We're extremely hesitant to invest at valuations that are more akin to like what people were raising at last year. So, been a hard pass on anything like that. In the last month, especially, deal flow has started to slow down a little bit.
Everybody has started to catch onto what's happening and it was slowing a little bit. I mean, we have made a handful of investments this year, mostly international. We've done very little here in the U.S. and I'd say, overall, our pace has slowed down considerably. During the first half of 2021, we were deploying at a much faster pace than we ever have before and much faster than we told our LPs that we would be and what we expected it to be. We deployed that first fund in two years instead of what we thought would be three and that was predominantly because of activity towards the end of 2020 was up until the middle of 2021.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. Early this year, I saw companies raising pre-seed first round of funding at $30 - $40m pre. I don't see that anymore. That kind of deal flow has reduced significantly. In the companies in your portfolio or other startups that you've seen, what are some patterns that you see that make some companies more successful in raising funding and building their business in the current environment?
Jake Gibson: It's what you would expect; repeat founders, the social proof things that VCs have always looked for. If you're able to check the right boxes, then you're going to have a much easier time of fundraising. We just came out of an environment over the last couple of years where, especially if you were in a hot segment, almost anybody could raise capital.
Now, we're back to more like normal times where I guess there's much more focus on finding the right founders going after the right problems and traction and product-market fit and all this other stuff that went out the window over the last couple of years. So, it's the same things; like repeat founders are going to have an easier time, companies that are already seeing obscene growth or companies that have already achieved some version of product-market fit, or companies that are in a sector that a lot of people are still chasing are going to have a much easier time. For example, the valuation collapse that we're seeing hasn't really hit Web 3 in the same way because people are still chomping at the bit to put money to work there. So, companies that can check boxes along those lines are going to have anything anytime.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. In the traditional FinTech world, companies with good traction and companies with good teams are definitely more favored. The conservative mindset of VCs begins to now look for social proof and they take more time to make their decisions. I see that due diligence process is also much longer. But some of that is still not true in Web 3. Web 3 seems to be unaffected by the current environments of the world. Is that right?
Jake Gibson: Yeah. It's kind of weird. Web 3 has always lived in its own universe.
Gopi Rangan: What are some trends in Web 3 that you're excited about? Have you made any investments in this area?
Jake Gibson: Not in what I would call Web 3. I mean, we have made some crypto investments. I would say that what gets me excited is that you have this interesting new technology and so much capital and so much talent going after it. There's a lot of promise to this technology similar to the way there was a lot of promise to the internet in the early days. You have this new platform, this new software framework. So, it's exciting.
However, I don't feel that there's been a lot of fundamental problems that have been solved yet leveraging this technology specifically in a way that any other technology couldn't also have solved. So, I guess that's where we get hung up. It is like there's not any themes in the space yet that I see that I'm super bullish on. I'm mostly just bullish on the space as a whole at this point. I'm waiting to see real use cases where real problems for real people are being solved uniquely with crypto versus like things being built in crypto for crypto people by crypto people. You know what I mean? Just building interesting new protocols that help you get bigger and bigger margin loans on trading your crypto because you are already in crypto and live your life in crypto is not exciting to me.
I'm more interested in things like Goldfinch, for example, which are kind of leveraging parts of the crypto and decentralized finance, the DeFi world in order to bring lending capital for the rest of the world in a way that they otherwise wouldn't be able to get access. So, if you're building a lending company in Nigeria or in Brazil or someplace like that, and would have a hard time getting the off balance sheet capital to build your lending operation because you don't have the same sort of access to capital that we do here in the US as a FinTech startup, Goldfinch is bridging those two worlds in a really interesting way. But there's too few things like that that we have seen at least where you're able to leverage the best of what's going on in crypto to solve real problems for real people.
Gopi Rangan: Replicating what already exists in the real world into the crypto world is not as exciting, but can we use the power of crypto to build solutions and serve underserved markets that could not be solved by current infrastructure. That is very exciting for you and that's what you're looking for. Is that right?
Jake Gibson: Yes.
Gopi Rangan: So, do you have a mandate to invest in blockchain and crypto and Web3 from your current fund?
Jake Gibson: No. We can if we want to but we don't have a mandate. Nobody's expecting us to deploy a certain amount of the fund into crypto or anything. When we raised our first fund, we got the question a lot "What are you guys doing in crypto?" This is back in 2019 and the context to that question from our LPs at the time was that they didn't want to hear that we were doing crazy stuff in crypto. They wanted to hear that we were sticking to actual FinTech not really doing much in crypto. We got the exact same question this last fundraise last year and I felt like the context was different. I felt like all those same LPs now have positions in crypto funds that had seen the crazy gains that they were able to get out of those crypto funds, and I think they wanted to hear from us that we were going to do a bunch in crypto. The tone has definitely changed. It certainly felt like they wanted to encourage us to get more involved.
Gopi Rangan: So, you have an open mind but you're not eager to jump in and follow the hype in crypto today.
Jake Gibson: We know what we're good at, what we're not good at. There's plenty of crypto funds out there chasing these opportunities. If we're seeing something in the crypto space, we have to ask ourselves "why it's coming to us and not one of these more established crypto funds?" We're not hardcore technologists. So, if it's something that requires security audits and really deep technical diligence or some crazy protocol, we're probably not the best people to do that. Which is why we go back to what we know - financial services. We know the consumption of financial services and where the problems and where the holes in the world are in the financial services landscape. If you can show me that you're able to build interesting new financial products, interesting new financial services business models, distribution mechanisms or what have you, that can hopefully bring better access to financial products to people that have been traditionally underserved, and the best way to do that as leveraging crypto, rather than building on the legacy financial system, then that's something that I think we can evaluate. That's something that I think we would be quite good at helping build and where we'd have a much better edge than if it's just strictly a crypto thing.
Gopi Rangan: What's your advice to founders building in FinTech? You've been a founder before. What is different in the FinTech world? What do founders need to do to prepare to build a company in FinTech compared to other sectors, besides the, have a good business model, build a good target market and have a big market size and all of those things? Are there any specific things that are more difficult in FinTech or different in FinTech compared to other businesses?
Jake Gibson: Depending on the business, there can be a lot more legal and regulatory work that you need to do before you can even put a product to market. You can't really move fast and break things. There can be a lot more biz-dev work that you have to do early on to get a product off the ground. That can mean partnering with insurance carriers, banks, capital providers - people that are going to provide you with lending capacity or familiar with that if you're lending business, partnering with payments processors, partnering with card issuers, you name it. There's all these different players and different pieces of the stack where you can't even really put a prototype and an end user's hands until you have all the pieces in place and until you've cleared regulatory issues. Note that they are related, because a lot of times just piggybacking off of some of those partnerships gets you the regulatory clearance that you need. But FinTech is not the kind of thing where you can go out and just start testing a product early on. You can get in pretty serious legal trouble. There is a lot more zero to one work that goes into most FinTech companies than into your average consumer or B2B SaaS company.
Gopi Rangan: Can you give an example from one of your portfolio companies? What did they do right to manage regulatory landscape and manage the business development activities and various things that they need to do to put in place before they start selling products? Who did it really well?
Jake Gibson: The way I would think about it is like it's not rocket science. It's just that it's a lot of work. Especially here in the US, there're playbooks for all this stuff now. If you went back 10 years and you were trying to do a lot of the stuff that's happening in FinTech today, you have to do it all from scratch. If you wanted to build an insurance company, going out and finding the re-insurance capacity and finding the fronting carriers and stuff like that, there weren't already a bunch of them out there trying to work with startups. You actually had to go knock on doors and convince them to work with you, even though nobody had ever heard of you.
Same thing on the banking partnership side or on the payment side, or if you look at Simple back when they were built 15 years ago or something as the first mobile bank, they essentially had to build everything from scratch. They had to convince a bank to partner with them and then they had to build all the infrastructure on top of that bank. It took a long time, took a lot of money. Whereas, nowadays there're playbooks for these things. If you're coming in from outside the FinTech space and you're like, I want to build a payments company or I want to build a banking company, you don't necessarily know where to start. You absolutely do need sector specialists in your corner. And I think this is why it's been so great for us to have a FinTech-focused fund, FinTech-focused specialists on our team, as well as in our network, who help our portfolio companies, because when you're trying to partner with a bank, there's probably a hundred banks out there that will talk to you. There may only be like 10 banks who actually care about what you're doing and will actually work at a speed that will make sense for your business. And then out of those, only two of them are probably even really viable for what you ultimately want to do. If you were to go out and just start from scratch and go through the yellow pages and start calling up banks, you're screwed. Whereas, if you talk to somebody who's been in the space for a long time and has helped a bunch of companies do this, they can shorten the list for you, put you in touch with the people that are going to get you in front of the right people at the right banks at the right time, and really accelerate that process.
Or if you're trying to start a lending company and you need off balance sheet lending capacity, there's a million people out there that will say that they do that sort of thing, but they all move at different paces. They all have different terms of engagement. You really want to work with somebody who knows, "these are the three, four or five counterparties you should really be talking to. This is the size of capital you can expect to get from each and the terms you are going to expect from each, so this is where you start." It accelerates the learning curve so much.
So, it's not that there are special founders out there that find special tricks to solving these things. It's not rocket science. There is a standard way of doing things but standard way of doing things is not documented anywhere. It's not out there on the internet where you could go read a checklist and figure out what to do. You really just have to talk to the right people that have been there and done that before.
Gopi Rangan: The playbook exists today because there are a lot of predecessors, like Simple and Neobank and NerdWallet, which you created many years ago. The business development that you had to do and the education that you had to bring to the market with every one of these partners was very different compared to many FinTech startups today that can piggyback on all the work that's been done by the predecessors.
I want to switch to the last part of our conversation and ask you about your community involvement. Is that a nonprofit organization you like working with? Which one?
Jake Gibson: Personally, I've always been a big supporter of GiveWell, which is based here in San Francisco. I actually met them when I lived in New York. Their whole model is basically to try to figure out the most effective place to put your money so in a sense it's going to save the most lives globally.
They specialize in things where you can actually measure the outcome of the dollars that you're putting to work from a charitable perspective. A lot of it is medical interventions or like buying mosquito nets and stuff like that to prevent the spread of malaria. Because of the fact that it's all about the effectiveness of every dollar you're donating, GiveWell has a huge focus on the emerging markets and the developing world. I've always had this view of like rising tide raises all ships and wanted to feel every dollar I was putting to work was having a real impact. I was actually on their board for a little while, and it's an organization that I'm really excited about.
Gopi Rangan: Jake, thanks a lot for sharing your nuggets of wisdom. You have a very refreshing view on how FinTech is going to touch every part of the world. You actively invest all over the world, and you have shared specific examples on what you see happening in today's environment as we are entering into a downturn. Thanks a lot for sharing examples from your experience. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Jake Gibson: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast.
I look forward to catching you at the next episode.