The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Perret: Budget apps fail because users delete them instead of changing behavior
“The biggest shortcoming that we found is that if you build a consumer facing product that largely tells a consumer to stop doing some behavior that they want to do, it doesn't go very well. So we would oftentimes, you know, build a budget and say, hey, consume…”
Perret: Visa's Plaid contract explicitly excluded global pandemics from MAC clauses
“And then we looked at through the docs and like they have these things called like material adverse event. So you can get out of a deal if something crazy happens. And there was a provision there that says you cannot get out of the deal, even in the case of a …”
Perret: Plaid's 2020 acquisition agreement with Visa was fixed at over $5B
“We have this deal to sell the company for just over five billion dollars and it's a fixed price.”
Perret: Plaid will build tools for consumer AI data linking
“Our job as it relates to AI is like, let's build tools that allow consumers safely to link their data with agents. Then let's build tools that allow those agents to take the proper actions, be that just analyzing data or be that actually moving money or someth…”
Perret: Payment cards remain non-digitally native relics of an analog era
“One of the most interesting things to me in, in the card landscape is that cards are not a fundamentally digital product. They were built for an analog world. The form factor to a consumer is still really hard. We talk about cards, though most of us don't have…”
Perret: Plaid gave Venmo a full year of free trials early on
“I think in the case of in the case of Venmo was like a full year of free trial.”
Perret: Plaid avoided corporate RFPs for its first ten years
“So for a long time, we really didn't chase true enterprises. We didn't chase anyone that made us do an RFP. I like, I think we started doing RFPs like 18 months ago because, and then, and so that's quite a long way that the company was 10 years into the compan…”
Perret: Venmo became Plaid's first major customer at 15 bank connections
“Once we got to about 15 or so connections, we then started having very serious conversations with Venmo. And that was the first kind of big customer that ended up really scaling with us.”
Perret: Enterprise deals require an internal high-velocity champion
“If we can't find A high velocity person that's moving quickly inside of one of those larger, large organizations. We just discount the probability that they're going to close anytime soon. You can find those people and they exist, but really finding that champ…”
Perret: Plaid avoided using 'sales' job titles for six years
“We didn't hire a sales leader until we were probably. You know, four years into the company, nobody had a title of sales until we probably were even like six or seven years into the company.”
Perret: Plaid published API docs online when competitors did not
“In the early phases that was doing something that was slightly different, which is publishing our docs online, which our competitors didn't do, which seems commonplace now, and also giving an online signup page for someone to come in, to come and use the produ…”
Perret: Plaid treated champion job changes as sales sprints
“And so for us, when someone left a company, when one of our champions left a company, that was like a moment of a sprint. So we would go in and say, great, who's the new champion and where is the other person going?”
Perret texted Plaid's first 200 customers directly to gather feedback
“You know, I was probably on text with our first 102 hundred customers just directly.”
Perret: Plaid intentionally avoided press and marketing during early growth
“We had a philosophy that we would never do press. So we never wanted to do press. We never wanted to do marketing. We never wanted to do publicity. Because we wanted to build a one-to-one relationship with our customer and we wanted our brand to be what our cu…”
Perret: Robinhood integration served as Plaid's best early referral engine
“And you know, the best marketing that we did was you know, having Robinhood use our product and then having someone use Robinhood and say, how did you do that to Robinhood? And Robinhood would send them to us. And so there was this kind of like amazing referra…”
Strange: Plaid replaces hundreds of custom bank integrations with a single API
“But now, there's a company like Plaid that provides all of that as a service. Instead of hundreds of integrations, I now just have one. Plaid builds the integrations, it maintains the integrations, and importantly, it translates the data into a usable format.”