The Exchanges

Q Were they selling them themselves, or there's, like, vendors inside Walmart?

A They had vendors, and they had partners, and they had their own Walmart card. It was a whatever card. So I wrote them in January before COVID and said, listen, if you're in Bentonville, I'd love to go see you. And lo and behold, he said, yes, shut up, see them with, with Doug. And he introduced me to John Furner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's alongside with Doug. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them, since they, since they were 17. And John is my age, so we're, we started at the same time in two different continents, and we were still in the same room talking about this, and I said, listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two, or three. It is for us. Let's figure it out. And they did something that never, they had never done. They created a JV, a company that we both go on, and we went together and built a rockstar team We have a new brand. We bought two companies and to build the infrastructure run by Walmart Smile today, and it's called OnePay, and it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of.

AI assessment note: “They had vendors, and they had partners, and they had their own Walmart card.”

Q How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's, say, 10 years older than them?

A I think they look at our charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the, the orchard structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center, and they will be for as long as we're alive in, in, in our generation, in our lifetime. But orchards and the way they organize people, Completely different, and you can see it. They are self-organizing, and I, I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dee Hawk, the founder of Visa, and I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and, and talking to him, and he's, he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organize, the best expression of humans are in the, Intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate, and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing, these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working, and that's what's different about them.

AI assessment note: “I think they look at our charts very differently. I think they look at functions”

Q That was going to be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named, you know, three, Pretty big, well-established companies, Stripe, Robinhood, Newbank. You think it comes from them, or you think it comes from a startup?

A I think it comes from them. Uh, because first, they're still founder-led, or Revolut, also. They're still founder-led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age, and they are at a place, and if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day one mentality, and they're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while, I thought the incumbents were going to catch up. In, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, Fair enough. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent or from a, one of these new brands. That's different today. Again, AI has just become a rocket, a nitro rocket for the, for this breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again, which is the beauty of the infinite game. In the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time, and then they were, the other ones were catching up, but the rules change. What happens? You're ahead again, and the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever on anything I do. I just think about, will this put me ahead or put me b…

AI assessment note: “I think it comes from them. Uh, because first, they're still founder-led”

Q So when you say you want to understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

A You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions, and you gotta build a level of trust where, honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta, how do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back, that they can call you when they cannot sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta, I, I spend most of my time and the team at Revit spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave. Once you know how, how people behave, then everything's fine, because you will see consistency or they will break it.

AI assessment note: “You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions”

Q a venture capitalist. So like, when you're building Ribbit, How did you apply, like, your rebel, like, your inherent rebel nature to your, essentially, almost like, you're almost like an artist in the sense of, like, this is the canvas that I'm building, this is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm going to do it. How did you think about it when you started?

A If I end up being labeled, first, I hate labels, and second, I will be very depressed. Because that's not the label, I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say, he was a rebel. That's all I want to be said there. And that will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind, I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's a rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do. And I run away from any of those things. Actually, I, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are nonstop asking questions. You want to learn. You want to keep, but you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stop to ask questions and they start to preach. That's past the rebel time. And everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life. So I need to live by that principle on everything that I do, on every behavior, on, on, like, I'm really now against the traditional art world. I'm trying, you know, to allow artists to show art in a different way. Uh, we revel at Rivet, the way we design it. We were, people were asking, well, what are…

AI assessment note: “we revel at Rivet, the way we design it. We were, people were asking”

Q Why do you think it should be one of the, the first things they're playing the game?

A Because it, it's, it's one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows through money. Like my, my whole life, the thing about what keeps my learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing static, right? Money is never static. Money is like gravity. It always falls. It always moves. It always, always going somewhere. It's like water. It's, it's never stuck. Energy. Is flowing everywhere. From the lights that we're in here, but also our own energies. Right now we're creating both energies and we're, we're sharing that energy. And, and so I find that, um, For something that is as, as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything.

AI assessment note: “Because it, it's, it's one of the things that flows the most in the world.”