Plaid

“And they became our first customer before anybody else. And it was guideline and plaid early on.”

“So there's a bit of a bias there to say, not just what makes me the most money, but it's first and foremost about what's, what allows us to build the network. Because it's the network that then delivers a better outcome for consumers, it delivers out better ou…”

“See, I probably spend like 20.25% of the time on like ecosystem health, probably 50% of the time on like business health, like again, working with customers and so forth, and then 25% on team.”

“Zach is a wonderful example of like a founder who actually does that, right? Like he really still does like IC level work like every single day. And I think he expects that of his leadership team, and then we expect that of the kind of the rest of the team as …”

“And I think, like I said, there's a lot of really tangible things that And we can share, you can look up around like, okay, well, what's happened to overlimit fees? What's happened to trading fees? What happened to average APRs and so forth? Adjusted for obvio…”

“I don't think it's fair to say that, Hey, no matter what the decision is or what you're talking about in the context of the business, that faster is always better. I think that's nonsense, right? And there's plenty of examples where you don't want to do that.”

“Some simple things are just like, what other roles are you looking at? And like, why? Like what connects all of them? And I think if you get an answer to that, that's like, well, I'm looking at this company over here, like in AI, and then I'm looking at this o…”

“I think we've had competitors that sacrificed, you know, everything at the altar of speed and it didn't work out and it didn't, and not at all.”

“We never really hired a lot of kind of middle managers, so to speak, right? The focus was really always on Hiring as many frontline folks as we need that are either, you know, building products, developing products, working with our customers, et cetera, or we…”

“Hey, I really don't ever want to be at like right at a hundred percent capacity. I'm willing to pay for some inefficiency so that as the market evolves, as our product evolves, et cetera, like I have the capacity to kind of adjust to it in real time, much more…”

“There's just, there's almost no amount of money, right, that I wouldn't reasonably spend to make sure that one of our customers gets to a good outcome. And even if that makes that account unprofitable, That experience will kind of resonate across the rest of t…”

“In the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small and everyone else was a hundred percent focused on continuing to grow the business.”

“So one thing that we did is we then created our segments. But then we put all the functions within the segment together so that the person leading the segment owned the entire end-to-end customer relationship, right? And so suddenly, even if it wasn't the exac…”

“I think if you think about in the US, like building a product Where it depends on bank connectivity or open finance connectivity. The odds are just insanely high that you're going to consider plan, right? It just, I mean, it's like a fireable offense. Like if …”

“One of the things you see a lot of is you see even very big customers companies implement with Plaid and scale to massive use cases without ever having to talk to anybody.”

“And we have so many people at Plaid, right. That like have internally kind of shot through the ranks that have gone from like IC roles to now running a hundred million dollar businesses. And so I could literally name seven or eight people on my team that have …”

“And even just like referencing, like in, in my world, like I oftentimes will talk to people that they sold to, right? So like you worked for X, you're trying to, you're coming to join Plaid, but I know people that you sold to. I'll go call them. I'll be like, …”

“And in some ways, to me, that's like the ultimate asset test of, did you do a good job or not? And you know, my own lived experience is like, every time I've thought I've made myself useless and obsolete, like there's always been some new opportunity, right? T…”

“But I think if that's the main reason you hire someone. I think that oftentimes doesn't work out because you end up overlooking like all these other things that are far more important in terms of like what that person's ceiling is. You know, I was a consultant…”

“The way we've structured that is like, if you're on the vertical, like you own it, you're kind of the quarterback. And there's an expectation that you understand every use case, you know, call it the 80%, but where you need to, You have a team of experts that …”

“Now we've had, you know, hundreds of AI companies signing up and we just announced, you know, OpenAI, we announced Perplexity, we announced Replit.”

“So there's still like certain customers that I go sell with myself, right? Because I love doing it. I probably don't need to, right? That keeps me sharp, right? Like it's fun.”