Wealthsimple

“Mike Katchin is the founder of Wealthsimple, which is like the Robin hood of Canada. It's a five billion dollar ish company today. He told me that like in the early days he was doing like a consumer free, it was a free consumer app. And what he was doing was h…”

“Mike Katchin started by doing lunch and learns. He literally would run around Toronto with lunches back like 10 years ago when he started just to do lunch and learns about finance and investing in different companies. And that's how he got his first few users.”

“You know, well, simple, which is the Robin Hood of Canada is still like a three and a half billion dollar company, you know, there's opportunity in geographies.”

“Wealthsimple is a super popular finance app in Canada worth over five billion dollars. They have like 10% of Canadians have this app.”

“When I was talking to Mike Kachin from Wealthsimple, he mentioned in the early days, he would call up every user 30 seconds after they signed up, right? We're talking free users who probably hadn't deposited any money yet, download their app, sign up, and they…”

“We applied to YC, little known fact about Wealthsimple's history at this stage. Got turned down because they didn't quite believe that anybody wanted what we were trying to build.”

“In the US? Because the industry is so big. You have these infrastructure players like apex clearing that if you want to start a stock trading business, you just like ask them for their APIs and you plug in. It is super simple. In Canada, none of that existed.”

“In fact, in Canada, if you wanted to open up an investment account at that time, there were rules that said that you needed to meet a financial advisor in person for an in-person suitability assessment for that person to actually build a portfolio on your beha…”

“I told him that we were planning to submit our application to the regulators in 10 days, and that if he wanted the job as our CIO, he would need to complete these, like, five requisite courses and pass them within seven days so that we could put his name onto …”

“You know, companies are roughly twenty billion or so today, which is you know, nothing to sneeze at, but it's not a trillion yet.”

“It took us like six months to get the approval, which felt like forever. Maybe it wasn't in a regulatory world, but then even when we got approval, we actually had all these conditions on it where we had to call every single client who signed up to do a suitab…”

“It took us another, like, six months of showing them the data of, like, how phone calls really didn't change the answer for people, and people really didn't want, young people in particular, like, really didn't want to speak to anybody on the phone. To convinc…”

“Like we were a massive beneficiary of starting the business in a huge bull run in the markets. You know, we were around with a stock trading app during meme stocks that was just incredibly successful.”

“If I did one of these presentations, 20% of the audience would become a client, became the first like reliable customer acquisition channel we found. And it didn't matter how big the audience. So if there were five people, we get one client. If there were a hu…”

“Some of them are Facebook groups, but the more official ones would be you know, Parent Life Network is a big one in Canada that that new moms are a part of, but even just other kind of fintechs that were partnered up with Wealthsimple and some of the other fol…”