Jason Brown
Former Founder & CEO, Tally Technologies. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@SF_JCB ↗
Jason Brown is an entrepreneur who co-founded and served as CEO of Tally Technologies, an automated credit-card debt management platform. Prior to Tally, he co-founded Gen110 and Bask.
2shows
3appearances
35statements
5resolved
2supported
1contradicted
40%fully supported
10said about them ↓ Everything Jason Brown said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Brown: Founders should assume VCs offer zero baseline value
“My starting point is you have to have the mindset that VCs are going to provide no value. They will all go on and on about the value they'll provide, but what you're shooting for as a base starting point is zero value. And what you're trying to avoid is negati…”
Brown: Candidates sourced through executive recruiters suffer from adverse selection
“There's just a huge adverse selection out there. Any candidate that is coming to you through a recruiter is they might be good, but they're not the absolute best candidates. The absolute best candidates are never looking for a job. Those are the people that ge…”
Brown: Networked autonomous drone swarms will completely upend global defense
“And so the first time that that collaborative swarm is used anywhere, it's just a matter of time, that is just going to completely upend, if it hasn't been already, the entire defense industry globally.”
Jason Brown: Venture-funded companies are not as overpriced as perceived
“I would actually argue that given those constraints, venture funded companies aren't as overpriced as you might think.”
Jason Brown: Generic pattern matching by board members is unhelpful to founders
“When the company is facing issue X, do not say, oh, I saw another company that had a similar issue, and they did Y. And the reason is, is that that is not contextualized to your company, your industry, the resources you have, the capabilities, your knowledge, …”
Brown: Top consumer fintechs achieve a 5:1 LTV-to-CAC ratio
“Five to one is a good number. Most fintech is below that because CAC is higher, but the best fintech firms are definitely in that five or higher ratio.”
Brown: The top 98 VC-backed defense startups capture 1% of DoD budget
“If you look at the top 100 venture backed companies that are doing business with the Department of Defense, and you take SpaceX and Palantir, put it aside, so now the top 98 that's ten billion dollars a year of business going to those 98. That's only one aircr…”
Brown: Founder experience builds critical intuition for high-leverage moments
“What I believe first time founders really struggle with is sifting between, let's say that the half a million minutes that don't matter and the 10 that do in the year, and that 10,000 hours or 20,000 hours of practice of doing it over and over really gives you…”
Brown: Tally will never explicitly celebrate fundraising milestones
“We at Tally never have and never will explicitly have a celebration around the fundraise. It's always going to be around product and delivering value to consumers.”
Brown: Venture capital is a commodity differentiated mostly by marketing
“Outside of the actual partner who's doing the investing, money is a complete commodity, and so the drive is to try to differentiate an undifferentiatable commodity through the quote unquote value add.”
Jason Brown: CEOs must formally adjourn board meetings before leaving the room
“Actually formally ending the board meeting. And that's actually important because you don't want to leave the board room as the CEO without formally ending the board meeting. Cause in a really adverse scenario, if the board meeting is still running, things cou…”
Brown: 'Move fast and break things' fails in highly regulated industries
“So, so I think it's completely flawed for any business in a highly regulated industry. You know, this is obviously healthcare, a lot of FinTech. These are areas where the regulators have a huge say in what you can and can't do.”
Brown: Early-stage CEOs should adopt a bimodal time allocation strategy
“I want to comment specifically in the first couple of years of the startups, because maybe it's a different once you get further out there, but I adhere to a bimodal distribution of my time. So I try to pick one thing, one massive levered thing in the company …”
Brown: Pitch Series A by isolating the key unproven deal assumptions
“When we raised our series a for my last company and client air funded us, the entire pitch was I walked in, I put it on a whiteboard, five assumptions. I said, These are the five assumptions you have to a hundred percent believe in in order for this to be an i…”
Brown: Bank of America's mobile app is confusing and overly complex
“Specifically in finance, you open up any big bank app, and I have an MBA in finance, and half the time I'm like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this thing? Like, I mean, especially the Bank of America app, like, literally, I have no idea what's going o…”
Brown: There are no high-quality fintech blogs or newsletters
“There's nothing good on fintech, I gotta say. I mean, I read the Wall Street Journal, and Telus Demos usually hits a lot of the, but there's not a really good fintech one.”
Brown: The B-52 bomber will reach 100 years of operational service
“I mean, the B-fifty two will be a hundred years old. You know, here in, in, you know, and it'll, it'll still be flying. Right.”
Brown: Applied Intuition defense work is split evenly between retrofits and new
“Yeah, generally it's about fifty-fifty. So the 50% of our products are related to vehicles or autonomy that's in development, and then the 50% we're focused on, you know, essentially legacy vehicles.”
Brown: Applied Intuition repurposes Army autonomy tech for commercial agriculture and mining
“The kinds of things we develop for the Army, for example, off-road autonomy has fed back into our commercial business, so into agriculture, mining, you know, and we just started to see this kind of flywheel start to affect that, to take place.”
Brown: Startups must maintain direct relationships with government defense buyers
“The first advice I have is always as a company, no matter what stage you are, have a direct relationship with the government, with the actual government customer, and understand what that government, you know, who the buyer is, who the users are, have a relati…”
Tally maintains a 99% monthly user retention rate
“Our retention, we have a 99% monthly retention of our users”
Board members should highlight trade-offs rather than simply agreeing
“As a board member, when another board member says something, do not agree nor necessarily disagree, but try to point out either the other side of the probability distribution on what they're suggesting, because no matter what, there's no way that what they're …”
Brown: Tally's workforce is majority underrepresented minorities
“And Tally, it still has a lot of work to do, so we're by no means there, but I am proud to say that the company is majority and minority, and that hasn't been an accident.”
Brown: Recruiting is the single most important lever for startup success
“Assuming that you have a good market and a great idea, I believe that the number one lever you have to succeed is recruiting, meaning the quality of the people that you have on the team, how passionate they are about what you're doing, and their willingness to…”
The other half of the tape: Jason Brown's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5Mamoon Hamid 2Sean Flynn 1Nikhil Basu Trivedi 1Angela Strange 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10
2024 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: a16z's Angela Strange on Why Every Company Will Be A Fintech Company, How Founders Should Think About Niches and Optimal Insertion Points, How To Transition To Become The System of Record & Are We Entering A Period of Bundling Or Unbundling for Fint
- 20VC: Why Most Founders Do Not Structure Their Fundraise Correctly, The Pros Of Having An MBA As A Startup Founder & How To Manage The Psychology Of Being CEO and Overcome Self Doubt with Iman Abuzeid, Founder & CEO @ Incredible Health
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Mythbuster: Is Mobile Dying? Is AR/VR Overhyped? Is The Excitement Around Bots Justified with Sean Flynn, Partner @ Shasta Ventures
- 20VC: The Future For Autonomous Vehicles & How Software Is Eating Cars with Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Investor @ Shasta Ventures
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jason's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Former Founder & CEO, Tally Technologies | 2 | 26 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Former Founder & CEO, Tally Technologies | 1 | 9 | 0% 0/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |