The Exchanges

Q Listen, I can agree with you more. Why we always believe in a small, very tight portfolios. I do want to ask you, cause you mentioned your approach to conversations with VCs there, and you don't always get the money from VCs that you've maybe liked to you. What VCs didn't invest, but you really liked to mind. And I guess, why did you enjoy those interactions so much?

A We've gotten plenty of no's. Don't get me wrong. One person I've really admired is Matt Harris at Bain Capital. I think of him as sort of one of the best fintech investors. He's been investing in fintech since before it was called fintech. He just has this more long dated outlook on the industry, having seen it perform across cycles. And he's just sort of a consistent source of wisdom. I don't, you know, Matt is not an investor in the business, but I get to overlap with him at conferences from time to time. And every time he just has this sort of intellectual humility, this curiosity, this Deep, rigorous understanding of the space, and how data is used, and how decisions are made by enterprises, and I think that deep understanding is what's critical to being able to provide guidance to a first-time founder.

AI assessment note: “One person I've really admired is Matt Harris at Bain Capital.”

Q Who's the biggest mentor to you, and what have you taken from that relationship?

A I've got to say, today, I have the good fortune of being able to work with an incredible coach, Khaled Haleem. He's one of the founders of Reboot. I've been working with him now for about a year and a half, and he just really helps ground me, and coaches do an incredible job of mirroring for you, where they're not in the weeds of your team, and they most likely haven't met most of your team, but just by being able to ask the right questions, they help you better process your own thoughts and your own instincts. And that is a practice that helped me think more clearly and more strategically, and it's something that I now try to emulate with my team to allow them to do the same.

AI assessment note: “work with an incredible coach, Khaled Haleem.”

Q Listen, I can agree with you more. Why we always believe in a small, very tight portfolios. I do want to ask you, cause you mentioned your approach to conversations with VCs there, and you don't always get the money from VCs that you've maybe liked to you. What VCs didn't invest, but you really liked to mind. And I guess, why did you enjoy those interactions so much?

A We've gotten plenty of no's. Don't get me wrong. One person I've really admired is Matt Harris at Bain Capital. I think of him as sort of one of the best fintech investors. He's been investing in fintech since before it was called fintech. He just has this more long dated outlook on the industry, having seen it perform across cycles. And he's just sort of a consistent source of wisdom. I don't, you know, Matt is not an investor in the business, but I get to overlap with him at conferences from time to time. And every time he just has this sort of intellectual humility, this curiosity, this Deep, rigorous understanding of the space, and how data is used, and how decisions are made by enterprises, and I think that deep understanding is what's critical to being able to provide guidance to a first-time founder.

AI assessment note: “One person I've really admired is Matt Harris at Bain Capital.”

Q Is there a fear of giving the accountability? Because you want to give the accountability, but you also don't want to create a fear of misperforming or choosing the wrong decision on the employee's behalf. How do you strike the balance of enough accountability without the fear from them of making the wrong decision?

A Unfortunately, you have to let the team on occasion make the wrong decision and learn from that. I may have an opinion and it will periodically differ from the team. I'll express that opinion. But at the end of the day, if it is a decision that they own in whatever function that they are in, it is not my place to override that decision. And so long as it's not, as Bezos would say, a tier one decision, as in one that cannot be reversed, one that's a company killer, So long as it's not a tier one decision, I will not overstep my line. That is their decision, and so long as I've been consulted, and they hear my perspective, if they still want to move forward, that is their call, and they will learn from that, whether it works out or it doesn't.

AI assessment note: “So long as it's not a tier one decision, I will not overstep my line.”

Q Who's the biggest mentor to you, and what have you taken from that relationship?

A I've got to say, today, I have the good fortune of being able to work with an incredible coach, Khaled Haleem. He's one of the founders of Reboot. I've been working with him now for about a year and a half, and he just really helps ground me, and coaches do an incredible job of mirroring for you, where they're not in the weeds of your team, and they most likely haven't met most of your team, but just by being able to ask the right questions, they help you better process your own thoughts and your own instincts. And that is a practice that helped me think more clearly and more strategically, and it's something that I now try to emulate with my team to allow them to do the same.

AI assessment note: “I have the good fortune of being able to work with an incredible coach, Khaled Haleem.”

Q You always have to have the optimistic mindset from the early days. I do want to ask you, because you mentioned the early days there with GS and Apollo. It's kind of often denigrated though now as a path in terms of the investment banking path. I'd love to hear from your perspective. How transformative was GS and banking for you in your mindset today as a founder?

A I mean, it set the foundation for how I think about value. It established not only an incredible rigor in how to be a first principled thinker, How to think about structure, how to think about arbitrage. I actually work in the natural resources business, both at Goldman and at Apollo, and it may sound like a distant parallel to draw between natural resources and global credit reporting, but I'll show that a little bit for you. In effect, we're on the hunt for global raw materials. We need to find global raw materials. And for our business, those raw materials are unique pieces of data that are hard to find and extract. And we go around the world. We find these raw materials. We figure out formulas for how to synthesize them and refine them into a refined product that can be used in another market. And then we build pipelines around the world to allow that information to seamlessly, instantly, and reliably flow into the hands of a partner in another market. And so in a way our, our business has a lot of similarities to a midstream business, to like an oil and gas pipeline business or something like that. So I think just that, that way of thinking about a globalized world, global commodities, and starting to think about data as a component that could actually follow a similar trend. I think just the work ethic that starting your career in the professional services industry just i…

AI assessment note: “it set the foundation for how I think about value.”

Q that can be done from it. I do want to talk about the team, though, because I spoke to Ilian before the episode at KP, and he mentioned the incredible diversity that you and Nikki have built in the team from day one. Can I ask, what did you do deliberately and strategically to kind of ensure high-quality diversity Candidates, both in pipe and in the team, from your perspective?

A It's an incredibly difficult exercise and comes with its fair set of trade-offs. I think as an organization, we've been incredibly fortunate in that our founding team has an incredible amount of diversity coming from all over the world in terms of Nikki being an incredible leader, especially within the female fintech community. So it has to start at the top. You need to make sure that your leadership team, your executives have diversity, because if you don't See that signal at the top, and it's very hard to build an organization that has that same degree of diversity that you need. So we started as three co-founders, and we scaled up to 10 folks, and all seven of those hires were male, despite having Nikki, my co-founder, not being male. And what that resulted in was just a wake-up call that this is something that, despite having a female co-founder, we need to be incredibly deliberate about ensuring that we don't get out of balance. And we then instituted a company-wide OKR, Around team, creating a diverse team and culture where everyone can be their best selves. And we developed key results, metrics around ensuring that our mid funnel across the company, across both engineering and non-engineering roles had a compelling level of diversity. And it becomes a red flag as a hiring manager, if you're not seeing that level of diversity in the mid funnel. And so, especially in the e…

AI assessment note: “we then instituted a company-wide OKR, Around team, creating a diverse team”

Q Favorite book and why? What must I be reading?

A I got to go with the book that helped convince me to start a company. It's a book called Mastery by Robert Green. I read this during grad school, right when I was on the fence about whether or not to start Nova or go back to the finance And the book is sort of part philosophy, part biography, part self-help, and it sort of helped anchor me in an approach to life, which is the thing that will bring me the most fulfillment in life is to master a craft, and my purpose is to figure out what craft I want to master, and as I started to think about in that stage coming out of grad school, mastering the craft of financial innovation, financial and engineering versus building an organization, setting a mission, Scaling a team. It became increasingly evident and clear to me that I wanted to master that craft of what it takes to build an organization that is incredibly authentic, that is enduring in what is in pursuit of. And that book just helped really anchor me in setting what was most important.

AI assessment note: “It's a book called Mastery by Robert Green.”

Q Can I ask, how do you think about working with recruiters? Obviously, it's kind of a more intense warfare We mentioned that earlier, but especially kind of with the diverse perspective in mind, how do you think about working with recruiters?

A I have never found a recruiter that can solve diversity. I think that is something that as a leadership team, you have to make a company-wide priority and do yourself. For example, I am working on several executive searches right now, and the first slate that one of the top tier executive search firms here in the Valley brought me was like, 95% male, and the five percent that was not male were candidates that I had put forward. And I said, hey guys, we need to pause this right here. This is not a slate that I'm comfortable moving forward with. We really need to push harder to bring more diversity into this slate, and that resulted in me personally emailing all of our VCs, asking for who are the strongest product and engineering leaders, personally reaching out, doing an incredible amount of outbound personally. This is so much work, but it's a necessary part to ensure that I'm personally setting, and as a leadership team, we're setting the example in front of the company, in front of all the future hiring managers, around this being an area of extra investment that is

AI assessment note: “I have never found a recruiter that can solve diversity.”

Q I would, though, love to kick off today with a little on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of startups and come to change the way we think about consumer credit data with Nova?

A So a little bit on my background, from Russia originally, moved to the States as a kid in the early nineties, You know, bounced around the States, started my career in New York. So it was at Goldman Sachs and worked at Apollo, which is a private equity fund in New York, and then was sort of confused professionally about what I wanted to do with my life. You know, I was enjoying the financial path, but something was missing there and decided to come out to California for grad school, where I stumbled on a problem. I stumbled on an amazing team to start a business with, and we knew absolutely nothing about consumer credit, global credit reporting sort of came into this space. With a blind sense and naive optimism. Honestly, without it, I don't think we would have ever gotten off the ground.

AI assessment note: “decided to come out to California for grad school, where I stumbled on a problem”

Q Can I ask, do you have to have that kind of mindset from day one and the cognizance to realize kind of the importance of the union economics fundamentals, or do you think you can do that growth at all costs and we'll figure it out along the way?

A I think that's a philosophical difference among founders. There are some founders who will chase the big cam. They'll rely on this notion of we'll figure out LTV later monetization. We'll, we'll figure that out. It'll, it'll come. It's only natural. We just got to get enough eyeballs and then the math will come. I think that's a different style and that has worked It works incredibly well for some of the largest consumer companies in the world. We've approached it from a very different angle about being very principled. And how do we think about our unit economics? How do we think about the defensibility of those unit economics? And ultimately, what are the steps that we're taking that allow us to continue to build a bigger and bigger moat around this or business that we've started?

AI assessment note: “I think that's a philosophical difference among founders.”

Q Yeah, and there's always a trade-off. I do want to finish it on my final question, which is the next five years for you and for Nova, can you paint that picture for us?

A For us, it's all about solving this problem of financial access for people who migrate around the world. We've built an incredible foundation that now has the ability to serve About 60% of the annual inflows of newcomers to the U.S. We use this term newcomers to refer to people who are new to the states, whether they be immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylees, or even returning Americans. And the next five years for us are all about strengthening that product market fit, building this global infrastructure to support newcomers, not only into the U.S., but around the world. So that means more data. That means more partners and enterprises across more use cases and more geographies. And it means more consumers and driving more awareness around this problem and the fact that we are the only solution in the world to it. And I'll, I'll push our thinking a step further, which is beyond the five years into maybe the 10 to 20 years. Our vision statement as a company is a world beyond borders, which is this notion that as the world continues to evolve, it needs to transcend the notion of national borders. And I fundamentally believe that there's a matter of time before we see these nationally siloed consumer lending markets begin to morph into regional consumer lending markets and eventually Super regional and global consumer lending markets. And that is a world that I find incredibly e…

AI assessment note: “the next five years for us are all about strengthening that product market fit”

Q Favorite book and why? What must I be reading?

A I got to go with the book that helped convince me to start a company. It's a book called Mastery by Robert Green. I read this during grad school, right when I was on the fence about whether or not to start Nova or go back to the finance And the book is sort of part philosophy, part biography, part self-help, and it sort of helped anchor me in an approach to life, which is the thing that will bring me the most fulfillment in life is to master a craft, and my purpose is to figure out what craft I want to master, and as I started to think about in that stage coming out of grad school, mastering the craft of financial innovation, financial and engineering versus building an organization, setting a mission, Scaling a team. It became increasingly evident and clear to me that I wanted to master that craft of what it takes to build an organization that is incredibly authentic, that is enduring in what is in pursuit of. And that book just helped really anchor me in setting what was most important.

AI assessment note: “It's a book called Mastery by Robert Green.”

Q Yeah, absolutely. Can I ask, is there anything that the VC product could improve on? I'm often thinking about how I could do better as a VC. Where do you think VCs could do better or improve in your mind?

A I see this sort of tension, right, where a VC's part of their job is to build a portfolio, and so there's a limited amount of time they can spend with any one of the eggs in their basket, but at the same time, the value they can present Any one of their eggs, I think, is directly correlated to how much time they spend with that egg. I would love to see the VC engagement extend beyond the boardroom, and some VCs are very good at this, and spend more time on site with the company, get to actually know the executive team. So maybe to boil it down, I'd love to see VCs make fewer bets and to spend more time with those bets. I recognize that that sort of limits their business model in many ways, but I think if they want to create more value, they need to Spend more time and really understand the business on a more of an operational level and understand the executives to be able to be a more effective sounding board and steering, you know, the CEO or the founding team and really creating an executive team that can be world-class.

AI assessment note: “I'd love to see VCs make fewer bets and to spend more time”

Q You always have to have the optimistic mindset from the early days. I do want to ask you, because you mentioned the early days there with GS and Apollo. It's kind of often denigrated though now as a path in terms of the investment banking path. I'd love to hear from your perspective. How transformative was GS and banking for you in your mindset today as a founder?

A I mean, it set the foundation for how I think about value. It established not only an incredible rigor in how to be a first principled thinker, How to think about structure, how to think about arbitrage. I actually work in the natural resources business, both at Goldman and at Apollo, and it may sound like a distant parallel to draw between natural resources and global credit reporting, but I'll show that a little bit for you. In effect, we're on the hunt for global raw materials. We need to find global raw materials. And for our business, those raw materials are unique pieces of data that are hard to find and extract. And we go around the world. We find these raw materials. We figure out formulas for how to synthesize them and refine them into a refined product that can be used in another market. And then we build pipelines around the world to allow that information to seamlessly, instantly, and reliably flow into the hands of a partner in another market. And so in a way our, our business has a lot of similarities to a midstream business, to like an oil and gas pipeline business or something like that. So I think just that, that way of thinking about a globalized world, global commodities, and starting to think about data as a component that could actually follow a similar trend. I think just the work ethic that starting your career in the professional services industry just i…

AI assessment note: “it set the foundation for how I think about value”

Q the fundraisers and the press around it and or that you can build around it. And you've raised from some of the best in the business in index and client and to name a It's not always easy to raise them, so I'd love to hear your perspective, because from the outside, often you get maybe a distorted view. How was the experience for you fundraising personally, did you feel?

A We were teed up incredibly well, and we went to grad school in the Valley. We got into Pagemon's summer program, Y Combinator's summer program, and so through that, we got an incredible amount of visibility from a very early start that sort of put us on the map in the first place, and so that gave us an incredible amount of access to some of the best venture capitalists in the Valley, and then that gets you the meeting, which is Half the battle for many companies, and I've sort of approached those conversations with a lens of authenticity. Like, if you can walk into that meeting with an incredibly authentic mission and reason for why you're doing what you're doing, I think it just builds an incredible amount of trust with the GPs that you're engaging with. My style in having fundraising conversations is not to try to hide the most challenging part of a business model under the mattress. Instead, I try to bring it up forefront and talk about why I recognize it to be a concern and how I've Personally gotten comfortable with that concern and what we're doing to mitigate against it.

AI assessment note: “My style in having fundraising conversations is not to try to hide the most challenging part”

Q everything fintech, so super pleased to hear about that. In terms of the conversations, though, they fundamentally back you, the founder, and I do want to ask about kind of your role as CEO, and especially the psychology of it. So a bit of a personal question. But really interesting for me is how do you manage the psychology of being CEO, maybe especially given the first time founding status?

A I mean, it's a battle. I think about it as this is my life's work at the very least for this chapter of my life. And so I am putting in an incredible amount of energy into this business. And it's really hard to strike that right balance of putting all of your energy into it, but not overextending yourself to a point where you burn out and you put yourself into a state where you are unsustainable. And I think our team's got an incredible amount of motor and pushes very hard, but as the CEO, you set the pace for the organization and every six max, 12 months, you have to fully reinvent yourself because the organization is evolving so quickly, right? As you grow headcount, as your challenges evolve, as your executive team evolves, you have to continue to reinvent yourself. Like for, I'll give you a few specific examples. Like we just crossed 50. I can no longer keep up with everything that's happening in Slack. Like I used to be able to read every post, almost every post in the company, and that's just not a sustainable way to keep up with how things are moving in the organization. Actually, the best ways I've seen this framed is actually from Ali Rogani at YC growth is as a CEO, your first chapter is all about steering the company to find product market fit. The second chapter is about your product is no longer the product of the company. It's really the product becomes the organi…

AI assessment note: “I mean, it's a battle. I think about it as this is my life's work”

Q that can be done from it. I do want to talk about the team, though, because I spoke to Ilian before the episode at KP, and he mentioned the incredible diversity that you and Nikki have built in the team from day one. Can I ask, what did you do deliberately and strategically to kind of ensure high-quality diversity Candidates, both in pipe and in the team, from your perspective?

A It's an incredibly difficult exercise and comes with its fair set of trade-offs. I think as an organization, we've been incredibly fortunate in that our founding team has an incredible amount of diversity coming from all over the world in terms of Nikki being an incredible leader, especially within the female fintech community. So it has to start at the top. You need to make sure that your leadership team, your executives have diversity, because if you don't See that signal at the top, and it's very hard to build an organization that has that same degree of diversity that you need. So we started as three co-founders, and we scaled up to 10 folks, and all seven of those hires were male, despite having Nikki, my co-founder, not being male. And what that resulted in was just a wake-up call that this is something that, despite having a female co-founder, we need to be incredibly deliberate about ensuring that we don't get out of balance. And we then instituted a company-wide OKR, Around team, creating a diverse team and culture where everyone can be their best selves. And we developed key results, metrics around ensuring that our mid funnel across the company, across both engineering and non-engineering roles had a compelling level of diversity. And it becomes a red flag as a hiring manager, if you're not seeing that level of diversity in the mid funnel. And so, especially in the e…

AI assessment note: “we then instituted a company-wide OKR, Around team, creating a diverse team”

Q I totally get it. I have to be honest, you said that it fundamentally taught you about how you think about value. I'm constantly reading the words of Howard Marks, Charlie Munger in terms of kind of value investing and the principles. How do you fundamentally think about value today? I'm sorry, I know it's quite a broad question, but how do you think about value today given that experience?

A I mean, you have to be principled in understanding how do you generate cash. And I think in the world of tech, it's very easy to get disillusioned by high consumer growth numbers or a large But at the end of the day, if a business does not have a clear path to generating cash, it is not an enduring business and will never be a public company. And I think press and publicity can create an incredible aura around a business, but at the end of the day, you need to understand the margin profile of the business, how quickly can it expand? What are the threats to that margin profile contracting? And so that way of thinking is something that I think is incredibly critical in choosing a direction for a business and executing on a strategy.

AI assessment note: “if a business does not have a clear path to generating cash, it is not an enduring business”

Q the fundraisers and the press around it and or that you can build around it. And you've raised from some of the best in the business in index and client and to name a It's not always easy to raise them, so I'd love to hear your perspective, because from the outside, often you get maybe a distorted view. How was the experience for you fundraising personally, did you feel?

A We were teed up incredibly well, and we went to grad school in the Valley. We got into Pagemon's summer program, Y Combinator's summer program, and so through that, we got an incredible amount of visibility from a very early start that sort of put us on the map in the first place, and so that gave us an incredible amount of access to some of the best venture capitalists in the Valley, and then that gets you the meeting, which is Half the battle for many companies, and I've sort of approached those conversations with a lens of authenticity. Like, if you can walk into that meeting with an incredibly authentic mission and reason for why you're doing what you're doing, I think it just builds an incredible amount of trust with the GPs that you're engaging with. My style in having fundraising conversations is not to try to hide the most challenging part of a business model under the mattress. Instead, I try to bring it up forefront and talk about why I recognize it to be a concern and how I've Personally gotten comfortable with that concern and what we're doing to mitigate against it.

AI assessment note: “We were teed up incredibly well, and we went to grad school in the Valley.”

Q everything fintech, so super pleased to hear about that. In terms of the conversations, though, they fundamentally back you, the founder, and I do want to ask about kind of your role as CEO, and especially the psychology of it. So a bit of a personal question. But really interesting for me is how do you manage the psychology of being CEO, maybe especially given the first time founding status?

A I mean, it's a battle. I think about it as this is my life's work at the very least for this chapter of my life. And so I am putting in an incredible amount of energy into this business. And it's really hard to strike that right balance of putting all of your energy into it, but not overextending yourself to a point where you burn out and you put yourself into a state where you are unsustainable. And I think our team's got an incredible amount of motor and pushes very hard, but as the CEO, you set the pace for the organization and every six max, 12 months, you have to fully reinvent yourself because the organization is evolving so quickly, right? As you grow headcount, as your challenges evolve, as your executive team evolves, you have to continue to reinvent yourself. Like for, I'll give you a few specific examples. Like we just crossed 50. I can no longer keep up with everything that's happening in Slack. Like I used to be able to read every post, almost every post in the company, and that's just not a sustainable way to keep up with how things are moving in the organization. Actually, the best ways I've seen this framed is actually from Ali Rogani at YC growth is as a CEO, your first chapter is all about steering the company to find product market fit. The second chapter is about your product is no longer the product of the company. It's really the product becomes the organi…

AI assessment note: “it's really hard to strike that right balance of putting all of your energy”

Q Is there a fear of giving the accountability? Because you want to give the accountability, but you also don't want to create a fear of misperforming or choosing the wrong decision on the employee's behalf. How do you strike the balance of enough accountability without the fear from them of making the wrong decision?

A Unfortunately, you have to let the team on occasion make the wrong decision and learn from that. I may have an opinion and it will periodically differ from the team. I'll express that opinion. But at the end of the day, if it is a decision that they own in whatever function that they are in, it is not my place to override that decision. And so long as it's not, as Bezos would say, a tier one decision, as in one that cannot be reversed, one that's a company killer, So long as it's not a tier one decision, I will not overstep my line. That is their decision, and so long as I've been consulted, and they hear my perspective, if they still want to move forward, that is their call, and they will learn from that, whether it works out or it doesn't.

AI assessment note: “you have to let the team on occasion make the wrong decision and learn”

Q Can I ask, once onboarded, whether diverse or not, sometimes it doesn't work out, and the big question that I always have is, how do you know when to pull the plug versus when someone simply needs coaching, more time, more personal development? How do you think about this kind of question post-onboarding when performance maybe is lacking?

A First and foremost, you have to be very clear in aligning with someone around your expectations. I think a lot of, and this is something we've learned the hard way, is if you're not deliberate about here is what I expect, Out of this relationship, out of you in this role, then it's candidly not fair to them to then come back to them, you know, a few weeks or a month later and say, hey, I was thinking you were going to do this, but why did you do this? That's a misalignment in expectations. But assuming you spend the time up front to say, here is what I am looking for. Does that make sense? If not, let's have a conversation around why you think that does or doesn't make sense. Let's align on those expectations. And then those are things that you're holding them accountable to, whether it be scaling a team or shipping product or delivering the Certain partners or customers, that level of just like clarity around this is what I am expecting. Inevitably, especially in the early days, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. You think you can do more than you really can. And so it's then on you to develop your own judgment on, you know, the reasons that we may be slipping on a certain KPI. Are those controllable? Are those really outside of our control? And they were unknown unknowns. And this individual is doing everything they can and everything that any other individual would do t…

AI assessment note: “reasons that we may be slipping on a certain KPI. Are those controllable?”

Q I would, though, love to kick off today with a little on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of startups and come to change the way we think about consumer credit data with Nova?

A So a little bit on my background, from Russia originally, moved to the States as a kid in the early nineties, You know, bounced around the States, started my career in New York. So it was at Goldman Sachs and worked at Apollo, which is a private equity fund in New York, and then was sort of confused professionally about what I wanted to do with my life. You know, I was enjoying the financial path, but something was missing there and decided to come out to California for grad school, where I stumbled on a problem. I stumbled on an amazing team to start a business with, and we knew absolutely nothing about consumer credit, global credit reporting sort of came into this space. With a blind sense and naive optimism. Honestly, without it, I don't think we would have ever gotten off the ground.

AI assessment note: “decided to come out to California for grad school, where I stumbled on a problem”

Q Can I ask, do you have to have that kind of mindset from day one and the cognizance to realize kind of the importance of the union economics fundamentals, or do you think you can do that growth at all costs and we'll figure it out along the way?

A I think that's a philosophical difference among founders. There are some founders who will chase the big cam. They'll rely on this notion of we'll figure out LTV later monetization. We'll, we'll figure that out. It'll, it'll come. It's only natural. We just got to get enough eyeballs and then the math will come. I think that's a different style and that has worked It works incredibly well for some of the largest consumer companies in the world. We've approached it from a very different angle about being very principled. And how do we think about our unit economics? How do we think about the defensibility of those unit economics? And ultimately, what are the steps that we're taking that allow us to continue to build a bigger and bigger moat around this or business that we've started?

AI assessment note: “I think that's a philosophical difference among founders.”

Q Yeah, absolutely. Can I ask, is there anything that the VC product could improve on? I'm often thinking about how I could do better as a VC. Where do you think VCs could do better or improve in your mind?

A I see this sort of tension, right, where a VC's part of their job is to build a portfolio, and so there's a limited amount of time they can spend with any one of the eggs in their basket, but at the same time, the value they can present Any one of their eggs, I think, is directly correlated to how much time they spend with that egg. I would love to see the VC engagement extend beyond the boardroom, and some VCs are very good at this, and spend more time on site with the company, get to actually know the executive team. So maybe to boil it down, I'd love to see VCs make fewer bets and to spend more time with those bets. I recognize that that sort of limits their business model in many ways, but I think if they want to create more value, they need to Spend more time and really understand the business on a more of an operational level and understand the executives to be able to be a more effective sounding board and steering, you know, the CEO or the founding team and really creating an executive team that can be world-class.

AI assessment note: “I'd love to see VCs make fewer bets and to spend more time with those bets.”

Q Can I ask, when you look back at the last few years, specifically within your role, has there been an element that you found the most challenging to scale with?

A One of the best pieces of advice I got, this is from David Bradford. He taught and created this Of course, called Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford, also known as this touchy-feely, and he gave me this advice with my team to, at onboarding at some point in my one-on-one, to deliberately enter into a contract with somebody, and basically the advice is something like sit down with one of your one-on-ones and say something to the effect of, I want to enter into a contract with you, and the contract is that if you ever feel like I am micromanaging, you have a duty and an obligation to call me out, and we need to have a conversation about it. Because if you are not doing that, then I cannot scale as a CEO. And I think that is something that I try to practice in all of my one-on-ones to ensure that I'm giving the team space to breathe, to be accountable, to really make decisions on their own. Because without that, I become the bottleneck of this organization, and we will spiral.

AI assessment note: “Because without that, I become the bottleneck of this organization, and we will spiral.”

Q builds the trust in the relationship from the early days. I think a lot of VCs always talk about kind of VC value, especially when winning deals as competitive as Nova would have been. I'm interested to hear your perspective. What do you find most helpful about your investors on the one side? And then where do you think VCs could maybe do better or improve on the flip side?

A First and foremost, it's a sounding board. My engagement with Index, with Kleiner, with General Catalyst, the With NICA, with First Round, we've been incredibly fortunate to have such a strong base of supporters, and there are strategic questions that will arise. There are organizational questions that will arise, and especially in the early days, being able to just pick up the phone or text with somebody who's built a business before who can be a sounding board for you is incredibly valuable. So in the early days, I can't speak highly enough, for example, of First Round's program and how deliberate they are about providing that safety net, that support That founder ecosystem, especially for their first time founders. And you know, you know, our team, Nikki, Luke, and I, we were all first time founders. Beyond that, I mean, the recruiting benefit. Now we're in the world of starting to bring in executives into the company. And that, as I've learned in the last few months, is not an easy exercise. And VCs can be incredibly helpful, not only in starting to surface some incredible pipeline, but also help convert the folks where you really feel that sense of resonance. Our business is very much a partnerships heavy business. We have to unlock partners on our support. Supply side, which consists largely of credit bureaus and other data partners around the world, and then enterprises …

AI assessment note: “First and foremost, it's a sounding board.”

Q Can I ask, when you look back at the last few years, specifically within your role, has there been an element that you found the most challenging to scale with?

A One of the best pieces of advice I got, this is from David Bradford. He taught and created this Of course, called Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford, also known as this touchy-feely, and he gave me this advice with my team to, at onboarding at some point in my one-on-one, to deliberately enter into a contract with somebody, and basically the advice is something like sit down with one of your one-on-ones and say something to the effect of, I want to enter into a contract with you, and the contract is that if you ever feel like I am micromanaging, you have a duty and an obligation to call me out, and we need to have a conversation about it. Because if you are not doing that, then I cannot scale as a CEO. And I think that is something that I try to practice in all of my one-on-ones to ensure that I'm giving the team space to breathe, to be accountable, to really make decisions on their own. Because without that, I become the bottleneck of this organization, and we will spiral.

AI assessment note: “One of the best pieces of advice I got, this is from David Bradford.”

Q Can I ask, once onboarded, whether diverse or not, sometimes it doesn't work out, and the big question that I always have is, how do you know when to pull the plug versus when someone simply needs coaching, more time, more personal development? How do you think about this kind of question post-onboarding when performance maybe is lacking?

A First and foremost, you have to be very clear in aligning with someone around your expectations. I think a lot of, and this is something we've learned the hard way, is if you're not deliberate about here is what I expect, Out of this relationship, out of you in this role, then it's candidly not fair to them to then come back to them, you know, a few weeks or a month later and say, hey, I was thinking you were going to do this, but why did you do this? That's a misalignment in expectations. But assuming you spend the time up front to say, here is what I am looking for. Does that make sense? If not, let's have a conversation around why you think that does or doesn't make sense. Let's align on those expectations. And then those are things that you're holding them accountable to, whether it be scaling a team or shipping product or delivering the Certain partners or customers, that level of just like clarity around this is what I am expecting. Inevitably, especially in the early days, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. You think you can do more than you really can. And so it's then on you to develop your own judgment on, you know, the reasons that we may be slipping on a certain KPI. Are those controllable? Are those really outside of our control? And they were unknown unknowns. And this individual is doing everything they can and everything that any other individual would do t…

AI assessment note: “reasons that we may be slipping on a certain KPI. Are those controllable?”