Venmo

“It's like how Venmo is an important product, but never will make money and never has.”

“I went to Venmo, and I just Venmoed him a thousand bucks straight up.”

“There is an app called Jelly started by Ikram, who is one of the two co-founders of Venmo. I am its largest investor. I think, you know, certainly, I think I'm the only institutional investor. I'm certainly the largest investor.”

“Our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because…”

“I am now banned from Venmo for life.”

“Our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo, and we, like, had this huge phone bank like a Chinese phone click farm, and we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny, and they would get that notification, be…”

“I am now banned from Venmo for life.”

“And so, years later, Cortina, who founded Venmo, and I went off, and we just said, look, we're going to start a company called the Fin Exploration Company. And we basically raised some money and told the investors we literally were going to lose all the money …”

“We're trying to build like WhatsApp for money or a global Venmo. You know, we've been building for two and a half years. It's super difficult. You know, you iterate, you keep building, and then, you know, maybe you have a moment. We had a moment last week. We …”

“As, you know, as the first financier of Venmo, let's just talk about this story.”

“When I went and worked at Facebook on the way in, one senior executive reviewed all my investments and told me which ones I had to divest from. Interestingly, path was fine at the time, but Venmo was a big problem. And then, yeah, believe it or not, I had to s…”

“Brian founded Braintree, then he bought Venmo, actually you guys have all used that, for only twenty six million, which in the scheme of things, not that much, grew it like crazy, and processed twelve billion payments, then sold that bad boy as a combined enti…”

“I was just talking to someone who runs one of the larger stablecoin infrastructure companies, and he said that the average dollar value is under a hundred dollars. There's a lot of data, much of it is peer to peer, and there's a lot of anecdotes and data that …”

“It is still big, but it's like, kind of shitty. The app's kind of broken now. It's been, you know, owned by PayPal for the last decade, and they've kind of like, I don't know, I wouldn't say it's not usable. I certainly use it, but it's like, pretty terrible e…”

“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.”

“I think in the case of in the case of Venmo was like a full year of free trial.”

“Retool started as Venmo for the UK.”

“I great fucking product. Terrible fucking business.”

“Like, for, like, three or four years in the United States, the fastest and lowest cost way to move money in the country between any two people who had bank accounts was CashApp. And I think that kind of changed in 2017 when PayPal, Venmo, Apple Cash, et cetera…”

“Or rather it was the cut through the clutter differentiator. There were like, actually like a lot of other sort of long tail of things that were doing those different, but it was like instant was the thing where, you know, When someone says, Hey, why are you b…”

“I was overpaid, underworked. A 120,000 bucks a year.”

“There's lots of small businesses and solopreneurs who would love us to have a Venmo integration. We have a PayPal integration, but you know, our target market that we're really trying to go after as our primary, you know, persona are As I've mentioned, these s…”

“At RRE, there was a bridge round we did for what is now a very famous fintech company that got the company to a sale. Ironically, though, in retrospect, that was just a good company. And they should have just raised more money and kept calling. That company wa…”

“If you're a company like Venmo or PayPal, who, again, you can load money into your Venmo account, but then you want to be able to get dollars out, there's way more regulation on how those businesses can use that money to actually fund their operations.”

“Which I think is like the greatest acquisition, one of the best acquisitions of all time, because you bought it for kind of nothing compared to what it is now.”

“Accumulation of money was not my objective. And I could have stuck with the company and we could have made more, you know, been more valuable, but it was like, okay, so if I do this, it's three hundred million. That's a good enough starting base to go off into…”

“Now I would literally text them. I see you're speaking speaking to at this event. Sweet. Trying to get some people to check out Ovation. If it comes up, we'd love you to mention us. I'll send you 250 bucks if you do. I would pay people to mention me on stage. …”

“And ubiquity wins. Like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Square Cash, all these payment networks, they became ubiquitous around the US, As more and more people started using them, and that's how its winner takes all, or winner takes most, I guess, with these types of pay…”

“Venmo was one of our first customers. We do the connectivity between Venmo and the bank account.”

“And we work with some of the largest brands in the world from Starbucks and Walmart, McDonald's to Airbnb, Spotify, Venmo, you name it.”

“Actually we wanted to kind of like humanize the money and make it less about the dollars and cents and more. That's why the note is like such a focal point of them. I was like, what is the thing that you're doing? What does the moment that you're sharing with …”

“Well, one, it was, the options were shut down Venmo forever or sell it.”

“I'm sure it's probably been over, like, a billion-dollar investment now to, like, wire up all these bank handles and subsidize all the peer-to-peer transactions with the hopes of someday turning on Payments to the merchant network”

“The direction of that evolution, if you're asking where, where would that lead you to think we were going, it would be towards a cashless society. It would be towards one where, ah, money was really just an accounting entry someplace, and in which payments wer…”

“Really because there's no business model, it's about, you know, people expect that to be free and it's very hard to make money on that. So It makes a lot of sense as part of a bigger platform. And, you know, now most people don't know this, but Venmo is owned …”

“We scrapped together 396,000 dollars. A thousand of it actually came from my little and my fraternity. That's why it was three 96 and not three 95, and he Venmo'd it to me.”

“It was actually the naivety that helped these founders build a really big company, or at least in terms of consumer impact, which was called Venmo”

“You know, ultimately do want to monopolize it and put some of those guys out of business, obviously, or have them acquire us mainly put them out of business. We don't, our goal is not to be acquired.”

“And so I was, you know, one of the first investors in MakerBot and the first investor in Birchbox and, you know, the first investor in Venmo and a bunch of awesome companies.”