Daffy CEO Adam Nash

SELECT QUOTES FROM ADAM

Auren Hoffman (00:05.006)

All right, let's do it. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Adam Nash. Adam is the co -founder and CEO of Daffy, a fintech platform for charitable giving. Prior to Daffy, Adam was the CEO of Wealthfront. He was the VP of Product and Growth at Dropbox, the VP of Product Management at LinkedIn. He's also an adjunct professor at Stanford teaching personal finance. Adam, welcome to World of Daffy.

Adam Nash (00:29.405)

Auren, glad to be

Auren Hoffman (00:31.15)

Really excited. Now you wrote the super interesting blog post five years ago called FinTech 2025. We're almost six months away from that happening. And you wrote about five major trends that will dominate FinTech for the next five years. Now that we're very close to 2025, how are those trends fared so

Adam Nash (00:54.316)

Boy, 2025 seemed further away in 2020 than it does now. I think I was right on the trends and I think I was just too aggressive as usual about the kind of movement of the market, some of which, of course, I probably underestimated how much dislocation would happen in the venture community post pandemic. I mean, when I wrote this in 2020, it didn't feel like the venture ecosystem would be impacted that much. If anything, it was booming.

Auren Hoffman (00:58.279)

Hahaha!

Adam Nash (01:21.408)

But obviously with the change in rates and the entire environment, think some things have slowed down, but the trends on

Auren Hoffman (01:27.842)

especially FinTech funding in general has really kind of come off the cliff, right?

Adam Nash (01:32.62)

That's right. And I think it's coming back, but I think it's been a rough couple of years for a lot of founders and teams to kind of right size. But the trends that I identified, I mean, you remember this too, Oren, is just, a lot of it was the lessons that came from the transition from Web 1 .0, which kind of ended with the bubble bursting and then what gave birth to Web 2 .0. And I was thinking about what we just went through as kind of a FinTech 1 .0 cycle. Yes, I know there was FinTech before, but you

Kai Fintech went, it's saying like, what changed? And the three that I picked up on that I'm still a big believer in is that one, that, know, lot of the products in the first wave of FinTech were very derivative of real world products. just moved them online. And so what I was looking for

Auren Hoffman (02:13.356)

Right, you could trade stocks with your broker or on the telephone and now you can go online and do it or

Adam Nash (02:19.69)

That's right. And so looking for novel features and products that couldn't exist before, before you moved online. The second trend was moving away from just every product being focused on millennials to basically focusing on other generations, right? You know, the pandemic accelerated tech adoption. Everyone got comfortable doing things remotely. Even my parents who are in their seventies, right? Deposit their checks and run their business mostly online now. And so was looking for that. And then of course, third,

really looking for multiplayer products, moving from single player. I think one of the big differentiators you get online is that it's meant to connect people, not just information and products and services. And so we saw this with Web10 to Web20, but I've been looking a lot for FinTech applications that uniquely involve multiple people. I got a taste for this at Wealthfront, of course, because obviously when you're talking about financial advice, you tend to be talking to a household, which is more than one person, not just a single individual.

Auren Hoffman (03:15.99)

Yeah, got it. So multiplayer at least means like could be two people or something like that rather than one or something.

Adam Nash (03:21.896)

It can be, but I think there's an exciting ramp. mean, most financial institutions are still locked into having, you know, it's a single account, individual account or a joint account. Maybe it's a fancy thing like a trust account, but native services and features that tie people together. I just find very interesting. And I think.

Auren Hoffman (03:40.29)

What's a good example of like a multiplayer, something multiplayer, which is more than two people in the FinTech world?

Adam Nash (03:48.992)

Yeah, so I think there's a bunch of examples and you see them across the space. Obviously anything that lets people talk and communicate and interact with each other feels more multiplayer. You're obviously seeing that around stock trading. But like I'll give you an example. One startup that I love, the feature they launched was, hey, there's a lot of people who have older relatives or parents or grandparents. And they're always worried about them financially doing something with their money getting

Auren Hoffman (03:59.982)

Okay. Yep.

Adam Nash (04:18.026)

you know, fraud talked into something. What if you could install an app or a service where it monitors that that older member of the family's accounts and if anything unusual happens, you get a notification, right? What a fantastic product. It's not totally obvious why that wouldn't fit in the existing world except the entire existing financial services industry isn't structured to connect people that way. And so, I mean, Daffy, my current organization, of course, built this in from the get go.

Auren Hoffman (04:29.868)

Yeah, okay, got

Adam Nash (04:46.956)

Giving is naturally a little bit social,

Auren Hoffman (04:50.414)

Like, so you could share, okay, I gave to this charity, share it with the world, share it with a small subset of people, share it with whoever, or, or let's get a goal together. Let's try to get $20 ,000 to this organization. So, you know, back in the day you'd have those like thermometers and

Adam Nash (05:07.756)

That's right, donor advised funds have been around for decades, right? Almost 80 years and yet they're still treated almost like bank accounts. One of the most popular features we rolled out this past year has been campaigns. So that anyone with a donor advised fund can actually run a matching campaign, right? Dollar for dollar for any charity they wanna support. And so that's a classic example of campaigns have existed before, donor advised funds existed before.

Auren Hoffman (05:26.158)

Wow, that's cool. Got it. Okay.

Adam Nash (05:34.988)

But in software, you can bring these ideas together and actually create new experience and new ways to give. So our members love it because, know, Orin, if you wanted to donate a certain amount to charity, instead of donating to charity, you could say, oh, I could double the impact by running a campaign, right? Instead of giving a thousand dollars, I could do a matching campaign and raise 2000. And so our members love it. It brings more people into Daffy. They connect around causes and organizations they care about.

So I think that actually these are the types of features we're gonna see more and more of but I just want to have a little humility here. I think it's gonna maybe not 2025 maybe 2028 I think is gonna take a few more years for this to roll through but I'm already seeing it in the seed stage, know series a community of features

Auren Hoffman (06:17.646)

What are some other, like, if you had to predict now five years, 2030, FinTech 2030, what are some trends that you're excited about that haven't yet taken off?

Adam Nash (06:29.292)

Well, I'm actually gonna sound like a broken record here because I've been talking about this more for 10 years. I really do think there is some demographic influence on financial services. Most financial products tend to be pretty sticky. It's a trust -based business. People don't like to shift it around. And so I think what happens when you have a generation like the millennials rolling through that's so large, you have this huge supply of young people

don't have that brand affiliation. And to the Clay Christensen example, they're not the best customers of the existing firms, right? They don't have as much money yet, et cetera. And so you get a lot of point products, which is what we saw in this last boom, one off, this is a better bank account. This is a better spending card. This is a better investing account, a better advisor. What happened when this happened before in the seventies and eighties with the baby boomers coming through, and you saw a lot of new brands come to the fore, old brands reposition.

But then what happened the next decade is as the boomers age, you started seeing consolidation, right? I want to get all my financial products and services from one area. And so now we've seen new entrants really get to amazing scale. I mean, we have, we have fintechs with millions of customers, right? You know, I was on the board of Acorns for six years, right? Millions of people are using Acorns for to make their financial life better. Coinbase has tens of millions of customers. Robinhood has tens of millions of customers.

And so if you follow the pattern, which should also happen in the next decade is some of those new entrants are going to become the new Fidelities and Schwabs and Vanguard's, anchored around these large customer bases that they already have who trust them. And some of the older incumbents aren't going to make the transition. may merge or get acquired. They may, there may be different aspects, but,

I'm expecting that kind of consolidation phase to happen at least at the very high end. And I think we're going to see a lot of the new players play a role in

Auren Hoffman (08:27.022)

In the, in, in the, uh, FinTech or Fin financial services, not just FinTech, financial services companies that are focused on consumers that are working with consumers. Very few of them have high market share. Most of these industries are quite distributed. They're quite diverse, even banking, like no one has 20 % plus market share or something.

lending, you you just go through the list. Whereas on B2B, you have a lot of maybe services that could have, you know, 40, 50 % market share, maybe Visa being like the one exception to all of this. Like, why is that the case? Why is it, why, at least in the US, why is there not as much concentration like there are in some other industries?

Adam Nash (09:18.176)

Well, I think there's a number of reasons for that. But I'm glad that you brought up the United States. I think the United States is a bit unusual as a market. Most countries find it very convenient from a regulatory and kind of governance standpoint to have a very small number of very large institutions that effectively work. That's right, three or four banks, most countries where there's clear number

Auren Hoffman (09:36.014)

Yeah, some of them just have like four banks and everyone banks on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have like 3000 banks.

Adam Nash (09:42.868)

regulators work closely with them, policymakers, they wanna see something happen. Some of the stuff happens explicitly, some of it happens kind of implicitly. But the US, due to its kind of unique heritage and background, actually has always had a huge number of financial institutions. mean, even to the point where in the US, most Americans find it fairly normal that...

A bank and a brokerage are different things. Like where I go to invest might be different than where I go to open a checking account or a savings account. Whereas in the rest of the world, most of that regulatory structure has pushed all that together into several large institutions. Some of that is happening in the U .S. The big guys really are getting bigger. But I think the reason there's so much opportunity is frankly, it's just the market is incredibly large. It's very liquid and it's trusted. Remember, money is a trust business. The amount of anxiety

that the average American has about opening an account or using a new provider is actually quite high compared to most countries, right? Their willingness to try something new, to open a checking account with a new brand that they've heard about from a friend, et cetera. But this goes back into the history of, you go across states and localities of the U .S. having not a couple dozen banks, but thousands and constantly new banks, regional banks, right?

services, new advisory, every time there's innovation in financial products, you get new entrants, etc. And so I actually hope that that culture continues. I think that at its heart, it makes the US an incredible place to actually build new financial services and products. With the advantage as a startup, when you have limited time, the ability to actually get to some reasonable scale quickly enough that investors keep funding the journey to build something of real importance and scale.

Auren Hoffman (11:31.394)

Now in the fintech sector in the 2010s, we just saw this kind of like big unbundling. You mentioned earlier, whether it's like, you know, Robinhood for stock trading, Affirm for point of sale lending. We've got Coinbase, Chime, Stripe, like all these different like companies that are like focused on very, very, very specific things. Are we going to have a re -bundling?

at some point or what does this all mean for both the startups and the powers that be?

Adam Nash (12:03.412)

It's actually very interesting from my point of view, because in some ways I think we're going to see a split. It's not going to be a single distribution, it'll be a little bit bimodal.

Auren Hoffman (12:12.984)

That's just like, it's like JP Morgan will have like be a place where you can get everything. And then there'll be all these like point solutions somewhere else.

Adam Nash (12:19.852)

I think you're going to be able to get everything from Acorns and Chime and these other provide Robinhood. I think Coinbase, think, so I think the really big horizontal players are going to keep expanding and adding more products and services. And of course the incumbents are going to respond by making sure to continue to upgrade their services as they need to.

Auren Hoffman (12:22.73)

Okay, yep, okay, yep.

Adam Nash (12:41.216)

But I also think that the point product or the entry isn't going to go away. And the reason is that we've learned so much about these business models and how to build these businesses. And like I said, the market is big enough because of the interconnectivity that we built out in this first boom, right? Platt, right? All these, all these ways of moving money around. Like I cannot tell you how hard it was in the early days of Wealthfront to open an account. People, when I opened my Wealthfront account, I had to mail in a check, a physical

Auren Hoffman (13:09.239)

wow.

Adam Nash (13:10.836)

I had to mail in a check. Whereas now we all take for granted the fact that, you know, using Plaid or a number of other services, you can link an account, everyone knows what ACH is, they know how to do wires, you know, all these things. And so I think that that's actually had an effect on the consumer where there's an assumption that these different products will work together. Like one of the reasons you can have a neo bank is because if you have your paycheck deposit into Acorns, and that's what you use as your primary banking or a wealth front, etc.

Consumers assume that they can link that account and pay their bills with it and do everything they need to do with any other bank account. And so I think some of the barriers and friction of money moving around that existed in the incumbent universe pre -FinTech has gone away making point products more viable. And then of course we haven't even begun to talk about crypto and everything that's going on there, which still has a lot of interesting potential from my point of view. So, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (14:06.872)

Speaking of moving money around, in the US, well, in Europe, I'm not a fan of like generally European regulations, but they have this regulation that basically makes it really easy to like move your money and kind of off your accounts to kind of move from one to another. Like, what do you think about like government kind of like tipping the scale and trying to help some of this like intermovements and stuff?

Adam Nash (14:33.044)

I do think the government has a good role to play around standards. I mean, I was going to make a joke in here. I do hear that the European sunscreens are better. kind of, I just came back from vacation and sort of thing. but no, I think that, and by the way, there's some great innovation happening in FinTech in Europe. You know, one of the companies I was an advisor for, Raisin, has built an amazing business just around providing a marketplace where, know, the European Union came together with common banking regulations.

deposit coverage, etc. But you still had a situation where it was hard for someone in Germany to open up a bank account in Spain, even if even if the Spain account was paying a higher interest rate and was they were both UBS accounts, it was hard to do and raisin has now built I think they crossed over 60 billion in your in Euro deposits. That's probably an old number. It's probably larger now. So but I do think Yeah, of course so

Auren Hoffman (15:08.15)

Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (15:23.5)

And obviously you have like Revolut, you have Aadya, Newbank, like all these great European companies that came out through.

Adam Nash (15:30.74)

I agree, but I do think where the government can help a lot is basically helping to enforce whether through standards or regulation interoperability, right? You know, if it was up to the big guys, the big banks, they consider everything with their customer relationship proprietary. There'd be no account linking. They don't want to share any data. They consider that their proprietary advantage, but that's very anti -consumer and it makes it very difficult. You get trapped in these services. And so I think

Auren Hoffman (15:49.26)

Yep.

Adam Nash (15:59.262)

an incredibly positive role for government and regulators to play is to ensure that for moving money around for customer information, privacy is important, security is important. But in the end, the customer should be the top priority, right? If I want to move my money between one institution or another, if I want to move my stock account, that should be easy to do. I should be able to connect these things together because most of our financial lives involve multiple institutions.

Right involve multiple relationships and I think the government by making it easier to do that and have transparency into where your money is and how it's moving and making these you do they build trust in the system right I can trust providers more and it makes the market more competitive right so you don't get incumbents basically just collecting rents off the fact

Auren Hoffman (16:48.642)

Yeah, or they come in with a teaser rate, never, or, you know, to keep the rates lower than they should or all these other types of things.

Adam Nash (16:54.924)

Oh, I wish it was just the teaser rate. I don't think it's a teaser rate. know, like I still, you know, I have accounts at big banks. I have accounts at a lot of different places and you know, there are still bank accounts paying 0 .01%. Right? That's right. Why?

Auren Hoffman (17:07.278)

Correct. Most checking counts still today pay that, right?

What is there?

Adam Nash (17:13.28)

because they want to keep the money for themselves. That's

Auren Hoffman (17:16.458)

In the, the, in the SBB world where, you know, one of the things that I don't think they appreciated was how easy it was to move money, especially if you're a business, like how should these companies now, like how do they need to start thinking about that side of things? Cause it could be good. You could be the beneficiary. Certainly like in that case, the FinTech like Mercury was the beneficiary of the money movement, but it also, you know, it could leave you very, very fast if people lose trust.

Adam Nash (17:46.634)

Yeah, no, I think this has existed for a long time. The great thing about working in financial services is that money has been around for a while and there's plenty of incentives for people to figure out how to get customers and build a business and build products. most products and solutions or ideas have been tried in one way or another, maybe not with modern technology or capabilities, but have been tried. But yeah, mean, everyone's already not going back to even the early days of the internet and online banks, the idea of hot money of like, if you offer an account and you play the high interest rate game,

Auren Hoffman (17:56.845)

Yes.

Adam Nash (18:16.588)

that if you acquire those customers, they can leave just as fast as they came to you. Someone else offers 0 .1 % more and they go. And retirees were actually famous for this. I remember my grandmother sitting out, like literally in the 90s, and how quickly that, if you're over 70, you don't have as many penalties for moving money out of CDs, et cetera. And so the ability to kind of hot shop and just, you're retired, what else are you doing? So my grandmother would do this.

Auren Hoffman (18:35.459)

Auren Hoffman (18:39.116)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Might as well get an extra couple points.

Adam Nash (18:42.934)

But I do think there were lessons from the SVB thing and moving money around. I think there's lessons for new entrants as well as incumbents. For incumbents, I think they need to recognize that customers and money can move faster than they think. And so they need to focus a little bit more on their customers and the features and not rest on the laurels of basically friction and the fact that people historically have not moved accounts so readily because now they will. And even if they don't move the account, moving the bulk of the money is effectively the same thing.

Right? So you know this from SaaS, like in churn, there's like hard churn, which is like, I want to close my account. There's a softer churn. Well, I kind of downgraded to the free tier. I'm not using it anymore. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that the existing industry would be wise to not just assume that they're safe, that this is actually an indicator that money and people can move faster than I thought. And I think for new entrants, I mean, I'll tell you as Daffy, it's a gift.

Auren Hoffman (19:19.916)

Yeah, or I have fewer seats. Yeah,

Adam Nash (19:38.836)

Right? So one of the things I got wrong with our launch, we launched about two and a half years ago. And when we launched, there was no way for people to just move money from an existing donor, advice fund to Daffy. Right? Cause we didn't know how hard that was to do. It turns out it's very easy. You can go to any Daff and just make a grant. You have to move all of it. You know, if you have a fidelity charitable account.

Auren Hoffman (19:55.756)

Right, right, because you just make a, it's one charity to another, right? You just give it to that charity.

Adam Nash (20:00.076)

Yeah, you make a grant. And so we quickly in the next sprint got that feature out. It's actually turned out to be because a lot of people look at their existing donor advice funds. If you have a donor advice fund at Vanguard, you know, at Fidelity, you're paying 60 basis points. I mean, if you have $100 ,000 account, you're paying $600 a year. That's money that could go to charity, right? Like, know, Daffy's less than half price, we're $20 a month, flat rate. So, so actually, I think that, you know,

Auren Hoffman (20:26.638)

Well, by the way, why does like, mean, I know why Fidelity, they always charge all this stuff, but Vanguard, Vanguard is so well known for, Vanguard does like, really do treat consumers so well on pretty much everything except for the donor advice fund. Like why haven't they gotten shape on

Adam Nash (20:44.364)

Listen, I love Vanguard and like a lot of people, was actually one of the great things that happened when we launched. Felix Salmon, who's a famous columnist, brilliant guy, loves Vanguard. He was even shocked. So when we launched, he ended up writing a piece about when is the startup 13 times cheaper than Vanguard? You know, kind of the best coverage. But the reality is part of this, because I think Vanguard is actually getting to the truth of the matter, which is that for Vanguard, one,

This is not where the next trillion dollars of assets come in. They've gone to such a scale, right? Like they have to be thinking in trillions and tens of trillions.

Auren Hoffman (21:17.08)

Correct. Yeah. The total, the total dollars in donor and various funds is the rounding error to Vanguard.

Adam Nash (21:24.556)

And, you know, and so there's a certain scale and focus thing that happens with even the best organizations that are large. But the second reason is these organizations, particularly donor advice funds have not invested in technology, right? I see donor advice funds that manage billions of dollars, but they have teams of hundreds of people doing email, PDFs, doing concierge service. And so a lot of that FinTech automation, a lot of that ability to do things in software instead of human,

I don't think these donor advice funds like Vanguard are minting money or you know, the profits. I think that they are trapped a little bit where they built a product for what they thought was their best customer who had a lot of money, right? They are delivering value, right? And so they built out Concierge service instead of building out software. And so like when I look at Daffy, a lot of people ask me, you know,

How can you afford to do what you're doing? $3 a month, our base account. We're free under $100. And like I said, our high end is $20 a month. When I look at it as a service, I I think there's a lot of consumer fintechs out there that would love to get $20 a month. mean, think of the range of services, $20 a month in software is an amazing subscription, $20 a seat per month. So I'll do that all day long. And for us, it's mission oriented

Auren Hoffman (22:34.978)

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

Adam Nash (22:46.668)

For us, the ability to offer the service lower cost means that not only we can open it up to those 60 million households across the US who give to charity every year, but it also means more money for charity, right? That lower fees means that that money is sitting there in accounts that can be given to actual operating charities who are doing good with

Auren Hoffman (23:05.592)

I have a donor advice fund at Daffy, but before that I had a donor advice fund at Vanguard. I've had one, but so many people I talk to don't have a donor advice fund. It seems like such an easy way. mean, for giving really anything to charity at all, it's a great way to like manage it and kind of like, cause there could be certain years you want to get more like, and it just kind of like helps you keep the flow going, et cetera, from like a tax standpoint.

Why do so few people use a donor advice fund to begin

Adam Nash (23:38.22)

Well, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but it's something I, it's something I tell founders, you know, when as an investor and it's something that I believe strongly. The problem is the business model. I mean, you and I both know we've been around software long enough. We remember when it was packaged software, right? The amount that Adobe actually cared about how many people were using Photoshop versus buying Photoshop. Like once you bought the box for 699, like Adobe got their money, their biggest question was like, all right, can I upsell the next version?

Once we moved online to usage, right, SaaS pricing made sense, right? No, they're paying every month. We better be earning that value every month. In donor advised funds, the business model is a percentage of assets. It's AUM, and it has been for decades. And so as...

Auren Hoffman (24:20.21)

That's still like, I mean, I still made sense prior to Daffy for people to have a donor advised fund, yet still so few people did it. Why is

Adam Nash (24:29.718)

But who would tell them, right? So financial advisors would tell people to get a donor advised fund, but who has a financial advisor? You have to have more than a million dollars liquid net worth in most cases, maybe more. An accountant might tell you if you had a good accountant, but most people just try to get their taxes done. And so the reality is, and the institutions wanted larger accounts, right? That's what they want. Like Fidelity doesn't want a large number of small accounts. They want six and seven figure.

Auren Hoffman (24:35.744)

Yeah, a financial advisor.

Adam Nash (24:59.2)

They want billion dollar accounts are now what's going around the industry. And so what you see is the industry was all aligned around the business model, which was really tailored to the ultra wealthy. And so I think most people just didn't hear about it. but you're right. I agree with you. The reason we built Daffy and I'm a big advocate, whether you use Daffy or any other provider, if you give to charity on a regular basis, right? If you give to your church or synagogue, your kid's school and alma mater, a cause.

Having a donor advised fund, having a separate account tax advantaged for charity. It's like having a tax advantaged account for retirement or for college savings. It just makes a lot of sense. And then once you have one, you start discovering like, this is so useful. I have one place for all my donation receipts. I can set up recurring donations for the organizations I care about. I can see what I gave last year. And by the way, if you actually own investments in stocks or ETFs or crypto,

the benefits of donating assets from a tax perspective are phenomenal. so I love it. At Daffy, I see this all the time. We've seen incredibly large and generous stock contributions, millions of dollars, even tens of millions. But I love seeing people who like, I see that quarterly vesting of that engineer coming through and I see them send into Daffy a few thousand dollars of stock every quarter. And then you see the donations go out to the alma mater, the schools, to

Auren Hoffman (26:01.762)

Yep, are way higher.

Adam Nash (26:25.888)

their religious organizations or the causes they support, it's a much better way to give and to give intentionally.

Auren Hoffman (26:34.478)

Now, one of the things it seems like a lot of these fintech companies just do is just simply make a better UI. The product might not even be that much different. many cases, in some ways like Robinhood, is it that much different than eTrade? The UI is just 10 times better, but the product's basically the same.

Adam Nash (26:59.84)

I think Robin has the advantage of actually trying, but yeah, keep going.

Auren Hoffman (27:03.566)

Okay, yeah, well, that might be it. But the UI itself is such a big advantage. Even if you've used like Mercury versus Silicon Valley Bank prior to Silicon Valley Bank blowing up, like the Mercury UI was 10 times better. Just, you know, the product wasn't that different, but the UI was so much better. it's just the UI. How much of just going to FinTech is just like making sure, like respecting the user, you know, really

making, thinking of them from first principles, giving them a great experience, rather than just like come up with some, like, you know, having to come up with some huge product innovation.

Adam Nash (27:42.38)

Yeah. So I think, um, I think there's room for a lot of interesting product innovation, but I love this attention to design because. You know, when I got into FinTech about 15 years ago, um, this was actually one of the big arguments going on. actually talked with some of the largest institutions in the world, financial institutions at the board level about this. And you have to understand that for most incumbents, they didn't think it matters. Right. When they, they knew money was a trust business, the relation was all about trust, but to them it was about.

very objective things like not losing the money, good customer service, taking care of different issues. The idea that the technology or the UI mattered was like, well, you have to be able to do what you do, but it's easy enough to figure out and you can get your stuff done. It wasn't a priority. my, but,

Auren Hoffman (28:30.624)

Sorry, let me just push back on it a tiny bit. When you walk into a Chase bank, it's beautiful, it's spotless. They think of everything. And then when you go to the chase .com site, it's like imagining going to the bank and there's rats and cockroaches running around the bank. That's what it's like. They do think of a UI when you actually go to the branch.

Adam Nash (28:53.16)

You're so funny actually just

In fairness to Chase actually, and I don't know if this is good thing or bad thing, they're actually one of the better big banks when it comes to the UI. But I agree with you. And that was exactly the argument I made when I started out, which is that all that energy you put into the customer experience around the branch, why did they do that? Because what they wanted you to feel when you walked in is that this is a good place, this is a safe place. By the way, some of the nicety of it was like, they're clearly doing well, they must be trusted, right?

Auren Hoffman (29:02.624)

Okay, well that's pretty sad if they're one of the better ones, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (29:25.282)

Yeah. Friendly people.

Adam Nash (29:25.612)

Um, and so what I, yeah, what I believe is that you do, we all talk about these generations, but let's be clear. The biggest generational break that's existed in the last 50 years is that there are people who've grown up with computers and people who learned how to use them kind of later. And for the people who grew up with computers and software and interfaces, my argument was that one of the ways you build trust with them is the quality of your technology.

It's the quality interface. If I go to a website and it's kind of janky, it doesn't load very well. you know, it's using an old form. It's kind of a UI that looks like it's from 2003. I'm sitting there thinking like, if they can't build a good website, how do I know they're going to handle my money? Well, like what are their priorities? Maybe, maybe I shouldn't be using this product. They obviously don't care that much. Whereas when you go to a high quality, modern product, modern UI, you go,

This works, this is safe. I can see why millions of people use this product. So I agree with you, Aron. I think that this was something that the existing industry missed. And then I think about five to seven years ago, the large incumbents, at least some of them got the message and they said, this actually does matter for this younger generation. When they come in and see bad technology, they worry about all of our service, right? How do they know that they can trust us with their data? How can they trust us with their money? Like, how do I know that if I have a problem,

there'll be someone to talk to, right? Like they were so used to things like phone service and fax lines. You know, the idea of like, wait, I go to the website, like I have a problem right now. Can I get an answer to my problem? You know, call back on Monday at 8 a .m. is not a great answer. So I do think that there is, I love it as someone who has a design background. I actually love seeing the renewed emphasis in finance in general around UI, but not as much as it could be.

Auren Hoffman (31:15.724)

And to me, like it, it doesn't make as much sense because the financial world is, as we mentioned before, it's so competitive. No one has a lot of market share. There's no dominant monopoly and so easy to move. so yet they're not really fighting for their customers. Like in certain cases, like Salesforce, like their UI is atrocious and it's horrible and it's slow and they don't really kick, you know, they don't really

care about the individual salesperson in some ways. It's like, you need like 16 clicks to go do something. But like they have a monopoly kind of, so like, it doesn't matter. Like it makes sense or even we're used to work LinkedIn. I don't want to like throw LinkedIn out of the bush, but it's like terrible. It's so slow, but they have a monopoly. like, great, like makes sense. Like don't invest in UI when you have a monopoly, but like these other banks, like they're fighting for people. You think it's like super competitive. I don't understand why they don't make the

Adam Nash (32:08.63)

Well, I think there's a couple of reasons, but I think you can look to tech for different examples. And I'm going to ignore the bait on LinkedIn right now, just because there's stories to tell. no, think about even in tech, the differences in strategies, like the difference in strategy between an Apple or a Google or a Facebook, et cetera, and how they think about these things. There are companies that focus on market share, the most users, there's companies that focus on usage because that's their business model. There's ones that actually focus on profits.

Auren Hoffman (32:15.811)

Hehehehehe

Adam Nash (32:37.268)

right, making the most money. actually, I will tell you as someone who was there in the late 90s when Apple almost died and Steve came back, that actually Apple explicitly stopped focusing on market share and more focused on profitability. In financial services, the banks are filled with incredibly smart people as talented as anyone in that industry who know the numbers, the dollars and cents, and they focus on profitability, right? So even that framing around market share

You get more of this leverage of who, what exactly business are they trying to build and their timeframes are not necessarily very long, right? These are public companies. They're looking quarter to quarter. And so frankly, I think when a lot of these design decisions come up, they ended up with this decision of like, oh, we could spend a lot of money rebuilding this product. And by the way, that product on the backend has to interface with 40 patch together systems because the bank acquired 30 other banks.

Auren Hoffman (33:25.654)

Yeah, it's very hard to do.

Auren Hoffman (33:32.267)

In COBOL, right?

Adam Nash (33:34.22)

All these other compliance things from historical things, operational flows, et cetera. And so the cost of that, I mean, I will tell you, I was always very proud. And once again, I don't mean to bring Wealthfront so much into this, but I remember talking to a large institution when I was early at Wealthfront and we had raised enough seed series A money where we had spent millions of dollars building out Wealthfront. And we got asked, we found out that one of the incumbents had figured out that to build something equivalent to what we had launched as our one

Auren Hoffman (33:37.73)

Yeah, it's a boy.

Adam Nash (34:03.872)

the MVP, not even where we were at, they had internally scoped that project that's costing over a hundred million dollars and would take three years to do. And so I think sometimes when we look at these decisions, we take for granted in tech, assessment of what's easy, what's hard, what's expensive, what's not expensive and what impact it will have on the business. It can be a very different frame than an incumbent who is saying, well,

Auren Hoffman (34:11.744)

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Nash (34:31.168)

You know, we could do this project, but you know, we've done the analysis and it'll only bring in this much in incremental revenue or profit versus this other thing that we could do. but I do think it's short -sighted. do think we're in a world that's increasingly virtual is increasingly online. And I think the companies that are not building core competency around design UI, quality products are going to regret it at different points when they have to face a fierce competitor who has that expertise.

Auren Hoffman (34:58.422)

Even Stripe and their clients are developers. But if you go to their API docs, they're beautiful. They're so well done. They even think of that, like, we're going to make for the developer a great experience.

Adam Nash (35:12.822)

Well, like I said, like it's very interesting, but like I said, I see this in tech too. You see technology companies where what they push through in design and what they push through is really to the limit of what they can justify. Right. And then you have founders and you have companies that are like, no, there's a quality bar. It's subjective. I love talking about this by the way, because having worn both hats, you know, the engineering world loves decoupling. loves decentralization. loves

you know, not having dependencies so people can just build because the best software very often gets built by one or two people, right? Design requires taste, right? There's curation, there's editorial. It's not about it all being good ideas. It has to make sense cohesively together. And so design tends to want a tastemaker, some unifying factor through everything. And this is one of the things that to me makes software so exciting is because you have to bridge those two worlds in product, right? The engineering world that wants

Auren Hoffman (35:44.268)

Yeah, of course.

Adam Nash (36:07.914)

distributed, separated, and then the design standpoint says, yeah, it has to make all sense together. It actually has to solve the customer problem, be intuitive, and ideally be delightful for them, be something that they irrationally love to use, not just rationally. So it's a hard bar to clear, but that's what we fight to

Auren Hoffman (36:24.558)

As a, I mean, you're a long time product management person. There's sometimes a tension in product between like what the data says and what the anecdote says. Like how do you navigate that tension?

Adam Nash (36:38.966)

I love this question. Yeah, this is and this is part of the product talk I normally give. think at the top of my ex account, you'll see it pinned up there. I have a talk about being a product leader that I gave a few years ago. But it's very tricky to navigate that tension. And that's because they're all different ways of understanding your customer. mean, any company you have all these different funnels, you know, everyone wants to say that they're the voice of the customer. It tends to not be one voice.

Right? Like every click, every data element that's left, that was a human that did that. Why did they do that? When did they do that? Customer service messages, who's having problems? Market research is telling you about your non -customers. have, you know, user research, have all, have salespeople out in the field, you have all these different inputs. And so what I tend to look at is I tend to look for some, I look for hypotheses, and then I look for some form of validation.

Right? So I'm a big believer that any input can be an insight for a new hypothesis, right? It could be from the data, right? I've seen growth product managers, engineers, analysts say like, Hey, it looks like we're getting a lot of drop -off here. Like that seems like a problem. Like data can be the insight customer service can be the insight, but it can be user research. could be market research. can be qualitative, right? You could just have a conversation with someone and it strikes you. Wow. That is really broken. I get it now. I didn't know that was a use case.

And so what I always look like is for one team or one function to come up with a hypothesis. And then I look at all the others to say, is, there any validation of that somewhere else? If I get a qualitative hypothesis, like an anecdote. Interesting. Do we have any data to support that? If I see a data insight, I then go to the qualitative and ask, what would explain this pattern of behavior? Like, cause the data rarely gives you causality. It doesn't give you intention.

Auren Hoffman (38:26.766)

Yeah, okay,

Adam Nash (38:31.904)

But data can tell you something is happening reliably. And so to me, the, actually think it's a, I actually feel spoiled because I remember in the early days, how little data we had in the little customer insight we had in the eighties and nineties. And so to me, it's like, wow, we have all these great sources. So for me, it's all hypothesis testing. you can get an insight from anywhere. It can come from any team. If it's qualitative, get a quantitative validation if it's. And vice versa.

Auren Hoffman (38:34.39)

Yeah, yep.

Auren Hoffman (38:43.765)

Hahaha

Auren Hoffman (39:00.248)

What do you think, you know, what are the kind of like the big non -obvious mistakes that big like product managers make?

Adam Nash (39:09.586)

think the big, well, there's a lot of them. I think, you know, the biggest, what's the biggest, there's so many mistakes product managers make. mean, this is, you're putting me on the spot to rank them all. I think it depends because product managers tend to come from one of three backgrounds. They tend to either have kind of a technical engineering background, very quantitative or a design background, very qualitative, et cetera, or a business background, right? What are we doing this all

Auren Hoffman (39:17.368)

Sure.

Adam Nash (39:37.386)

And the best product managers find ways to shore up their skills in the other two. In fact, some of the best have done multiple roles that way. But so I think the mistakes that each type make are different, but if I had to level it up and this will not everyone will agree with me. just to be clear, I've always believed that software at its best is actually a team

Auren Hoffman (39:44.726)

Yeah, for

Adam Nash (39:59.37)

Right. I grew up in California. I played volleyball in high school. I believe in team sports. I think that, everyone has different skills. You organize plays and what you can do together ends up being a multiplier over what you could do alone. And so I think that the biggest mistake that, that product managers make is they think they're managers instead of what they really need to be, which is leaders. have a team with different skills and different backgrounds and different insights, but they're all brilliant.

They all want to win and do the right thing for the customer. And so that idea of really thinking of yourself more as a leader, not as someone who can, you know, like, no, we have a process and check this box and do this. And, you know, there's a lot of product managers out there who think the job is somehow a process job, right? Okay. Like if I do these 80 things in order, I will be doing a good job. That's not actually the

Right? Product is one of the few roles where I believe firmly where you actually get judged based on the results. And by the way, even the best product folks don't bat a thousand. Right? And when we can talk about, you know, batting average versus slugging percentage for the handful of people out there who still love baseball statistics, I still love baseball statistics, but I know, I know actually it's funny, but it's a great analogy, but you know, it's so I think that when I see

Auren Hoffman (41:15.192)

There's only four of us left.

Adam Nash (41:22.014)

I see product managers like when I was at Dropbox, I gave this talk about how to think about risk and how to manage the team, cetera. But it really around very basic things of one, making sure that your whole team is aligned. They know the strategy. They know the priority. They know the goals. There's a reason why you're doing this project. Does everyone understand it? Because if they don't understand it, they're not going to be putting their best effort and applying their knowledge and skills to helping you solve that problem, right? You're not solving the problem. Your team is going to solve the

But then second, think the big mistake they make is it's not a job that's meant to be an E for effort. It's not just going through the motions, right? Like if you are a product manager, if you're the product leader for the area in the end, you have to make sure that what you're building fits into the overall strategy. You know what the goals are, how it's going to measured because you are going to be the one the day after you launch where people come to you and say, Hey, did it work? Right. And so

I've been amazed at how many product managers don't ask themselves that simple question. The day after this launches, your CEO comes to you and say, hey, how's it going? I know we launched yesterday. What do they want to hear? And the answer is there was a reason why that project exists in the fun place. Was it to get more users? Was it a growth feature? Was it an engagement feature, more activity? Was it a revenue driving feature? I was shocked when I got into product.

Cause I came over from the engineering side. I was shocked when I got into product at how many projects did not have a clearly articulated goal. Right. And so, you know, if I had to give any advice to product managers out there, it would be the leadership piece. And part of leadership is making sure your team knows what the goal is, how they'll be judged.

Auren Hoffman (43:00.283)

What?

Auren Hoffman (43:04.494)

So let's say you have a hundred person company, tech company, you may have, I don't know, eight product managers total at that company. And you have a lot of engineers, have sales people, customer success, you have marketing people, you have all these other people. In some ways, the product manager is also a bit of the router. Like they have to interact with all of those people. Even if you're the VP of product, like you may only have like a few people under you.

You have to be constantly interacting and you're kind of at the center of the company. I'm like, most of these other things are a little bit more on the edges, sales, marketing, engineering, or something. lot of like engineers don't talk to people in marketing, but the product people have to talk to everybody. like, is there a certain type of personality that like is like thrives at being that router?

Adam Nash (43:55.768)

well, so I think you're getting at the heart of it, that there's a people element to it. And so I do think communication is important and connectivity because product managers in the end, the, because they're judged by the overall success of the product of what you ship, it becomes a little bit of, yeah, how do you get all those people, all that information flowing across the best solution out there to kind of achieve that goal. And I do think that they are glue, but it's never meant to be people. It has to be a leveraged role.

I mean, I'm on the record of saying like, you know, I've actually seen teams with, with engineers and designers where I thought the product manager involved was a net negative, right? Just getting a couple of engineers together and designer, they can do amazing work together. But usually the product manager, think about how expensive the product manager role is. You have to say like, this product will turn out better. Instead of hiring another designer, instead of hiring another engineer, we decided to hire this product manager. Like that's a high bar to clear.

Auren Hoffman (44:51.064)

Right, right, right, good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Nash (44:52.49)

You can do a lot with another engineer, especially at a startup, you're a hundred people. Like, you know, these decisions, that's an expensive decision. And so I think that the best product managers think of themselves the way they, they are leverage, right? You believe the team is doing so much more. And so sometimes that's a communication plot. the reason you see so many writing oriented cultures now, which I love is the more people write, it used to be only the product managers wrote a lot. Now you get engineers writing, designers writing, Figma is shared, like all it's fantastic.

So sometimes it's communication, sometimes it's knowledge, sometimes it's just the framework of putting things together. Sometimes it's making sure that the right data is in front of the right people. But I do think that product, I actually am not a big fan of large product teams. I do think that the closer the engineers are to the customer, the easier it is for them to understand the customer viewpoint directly.

The further engineers are from the customer, the more you need people who are saying, no, actually we've talked to the customer, we studied the customer, we've looked at the data, this is actually what's highest value. But yeah, this is what I meant by being a leadership and kind of a team role. It's not, the product manager does not do everything. And by the way, despite the CEO analogy that some people like to use, no one reports to you. I mean, I remember as engineer, when I first like the product manager, I'm

wait, do I have to do what they say? I don't report to you. And by the way, there's like a little bit of that moment where like product managers suddenly realize like, wait, how do I get anyone to do anything? And the answer is it's a leadership question. You know what the team wants to do is they want to win. They want to succeed. They join that company for a reason. They're working on that product for a reason. And if you do a good job communicating what you're trying to do and why and how it's good for the customer and good for your business and good for the team and it's exciting.

Auren Hoffman (46:12.147)

Totally.

Auren Hoffman (46:20.803)

Right, right.

Adam Nash (46:39.948)

I've seen product managers get teams to do more in a week or two than they would normally get done in a quarter spinning off and re -architecting things and rewriting things, et cetera. But it is a high bar to clear. And I wish I could tell you that almost all product managers clear it, but they don't. There's quite a few who think it's a process

Auren Hoffman (47:00.172)

Now, a lovely advice for, kind of finance advice for the world of DAS listener. And the average world of DAS listeners actually super wealthy. Most of them are CEOs or executives at companies. They're doing pretty well. They've got a big career ahead of them as well. So they're maybe not like the average consumer out there.

Definitely they should get a DAF like a hundred percent. Right. So that that's, that's for sure. They've probably already done like the basic stuff. What else should they be looking at doing that maybe they haven't thought through

Adam Nash (47:39.04)

that's interesting. think, and I want to be careful and judicious about advice because everyone's situation is different and at different places age and that sort of thing. I'm glad you mentioned the donor advice fund. actually, to your point, actually, I've been surprised at how many very educated, intelligent people don't know that donor advice funds exist. Yeah,

Auren Hoffman (47:45.294)

Of course,

Auren Hoffman (47:56.13)

Yeah, at the end of this podcast, all of them are going to set up a donor advice fund. Yeah. Like that's a hundred percent. If they haven't done it, they're going to do it for sure. Like that that's table stakes.

Adam Nash (48:03.62)

Yeah, table six, but um, but I think in general, I actually back up to the basics, which is I actually come from the point of view around money that money is rarely the goal. It's a means to an end. And I think that not enough people actually take the time to think about what life they want to have, like what their priorities are. One of the reasons I've been married more than 20 years, but one of the reasons my wife and I have done well together

Auren Hoffman (48:25.378)

Congratulations.

Adam Nash (48:28.766)

We talked early about the life we wanted to have and we decided we wanted to build it together and there's an alignment. And by the way, even when it comes to money, every year in the summer, it's actually coming up in August, we go through all of our finances and look at it together and we talk about what happened in the previous year and what stresses and strains might happen in the next year.

Auren Hoffman (48:47.926)

Why August? Is this because that's when you're about to do your taxes or something or why is that? It's just a slow time. OK, got it. OK, OK.

Adam Nash (48:52.48)

Nah, it's just a slow time. It's just an easier time to do it. It turns out, you know, there's a lot that happens. But so I think, look, if I don't know it's a board meeting, but I think allocating time, if you are married, if you have a partner, etc, you'd be shocked at how many people do not have an open relationship, transparent relationship around money, right? They'll talk about all sorts of other things that are serious, etc.

Auren Hoffman (48:58.956)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a marital board meeting you have.

Auren Hoffman (49:20.118)

Yeah, that's a great idea. mean, my wife and I should do it. That's a great idea.

Adam Nash (49:23.748)

And, and it's not a hard thing to do. And I think it builds trust and actually gets you to the real questions. I think that, the next thing I would probably recommend is, is, you know, on goals is remember, there is prioritization. mean, I'm a product guy, so I'm going to tell you, everyone wants everything. get it. But in the end of the day, I think, you know, I was very influenced. There, there are some, there are some theories around risk and finance that are not based on volatility. They're based on kind of the human thing. What, where will your regrets be?

Right? For some people, right? And I'm not saying everyone, but for some people, they're like, if I can't help my kids go to college, I feel like I failed. Just be honest about that. Right? Like that's not number go up that that's like, no, there's a specific goal where you're going to be risk averse until you feel like that goal is achieved. And then you're going to be risk seeking. And we all know that one of the problems people have going after opportunities is actually being risk seeking enough to actually put themselves in the position.

Auren Hoffman (50:03.052)

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Nash (50:23.788)

to have outsized success. So I am a big believer in actually having that real talk about what the goals are and the highest priorities. But I mean, the last thing is, is just to remember, it's a little bit of humility. And I know this is really hard because the listeners of this podcast, you know, yourself, you know, et cetera, all very high IQ, all very successful. There's some ranking somewhere, there's some dimension where they're not just 1%. They might be within the 0 .1%, 0 .01 % in the world. And it's very hard.

Auren Hoffman (50:52.056)

Certainly on IQ, I think our average audience is at the 50th percentile. we're not that great on the IQ front, but maybe on the other things we're doing well. Yeah.

Adam Nash (50:59.978)

Well, listen, so like, I'll just say that actually, it can be very hard when you are so good at something. And I know this because my family, a lot of my family are previous generation doctors, lawyers, that sort of thing. These are brilliant people might know the law better than anyone might have argued a case in front of the Supreme Court. A doctor might be one of the best in their field. But just recognizing that when it comes to money, when it comes to investing, right, the odds are really stacked against you somehow beating the market somehow outperforming that way.

Most of us are going to find our success building products, building services, building businesses where we are experts. And so understanding that, you know, a lot of the things, mean, Isaac Newton famously got caught up in a financial bubble and speculation, right? Like having the humility to say that. I don't understand this enough. The greatest thing that Warren Buffett has ever done around investments at times is, is to say.

Auren Hoffman (51:44.108)

Yeah, of course.

Adam Nash (51:57.812)

that may be a great business, it's not one that I understand, or I understand how that's gonna work, et cetera. And by the way, this is why he was very late into technology. Having some humility about what you know and what you don't know, understanding where you're gonna find success, and then not falling into that trap, that kind of competitive greed trap that it feels like, all these other people seem to be making lots of money for free, I should go make money for free. And realizing that that's more of a distraction.

Auren Hoffman (52:21.518)

Totally.

Adam Nash (52:25.11)

than anything else in value creation. I think, look, gambling is in some ways kind of an entertainment thing, right? It's,

Auren Hoffman (52:32.32)

Yeah, it's fun if you want to do if you have a side little pool to gamble with as long as it's a small piece of your income. Yeah.

Adam Nash (52:36.044)

Yeah. Some people think it's fun. You know, I am, I'm, I'm, I'm no fun when I go to Vegas and that sort of thing. I like do one bet and that sort of thing. But you know, this idea of, you know, to be risk seeking where you have an advantage to where you actually have information, where you have capabilities, other people don't financial markets are rarely that place. I mean, I cannot tell you how many brilliant people around the world wake up every morning and their livelihood depends.

on them figuring out some way to generate a little bit more money than everyone else. And so the idea that in your spare time, you're gonna go off and somehow like run the table. It just gets a lot of very smart, successful people into a lot of trouble. And so usually those are the things I talk about with folks.

Auren Hoffman (53:22.166)

of like things like, you know, other types of products like a self -directed IRA, which feels like very similar to like a DAF. And in many ways, there's a lot of similarities to those types of things.

Adam Nash (53:34.25)

Yeah, well, I you know, I'm an investor in one company, Alto IRA that offers self -directed IRAs. And so I have some bias. I think the short answer is I like the idea of a self -directed IRA. I like giving people the flexibility to invest how they want to invest. And I do think that there are assets that go beyond just the standard stocks and bonds that can add value to a diversified portfolio for sure. And you don't need to believe me, right? Like endowments know this, et cetera.

Auren Hoffman (53:39.532)

Yep, yeah, yeah, good company.

Adam Nash (54:02.666)

Retirement accounts are invested ideally for a very long time. And so that can make sense. That being said, sometimes I think people are over optimizing a small problem instead of focusing on the big one. I am an engineer at heart, right? Like you wanna, if you have a performance issue, you go where the biggest performance issue is, you know, on the small one. And so for me, know, chasing the stream of building up a giant IRA is not really the point. Some people get really irrationally.

Auren Hoffman (54:19.256)

Good point, yeah.

Adam Nash (54:30.312)

energized by saving money on taxes. And look, you should be smart about taxes. They set up the rules for a

Auren Hoffman (54:32.78)

Yeah. Especially if you I mean, you live in California, right? So especially if you live in California.

Adam Nash (54:39.094)

California likes to make it very clear that taxes matter and it's a big number to focus on. But fundamentally, know, so like, you know, for once again, it comes back to that basic advice of like, is that really where your time is best spent? You know, so if you want to build a portfolio for the long term that involves assets that you can't get into traditional IRA, yeah, a self -directed IRA can make sense for those assets for sure, or for a portfolio.

Auren Hoffman (54:42.51)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 54%, right? Yeah,

Adam Nash (55:06.304)

But in general, I get worried sometimes because I see this lottery effect. mean, everyone knows the Peter Thiel story. Everyone knows that somehow Facebook stock very, very early got into a Roth IRA that ended up being worth a lot. so I understand. No, no. And by the way, it can make sense. But you also have to remember that those people were in very particular positions. They were already fairly successful, et cetera, and could take some of that risk.

Auren Hoffman (55:12.034)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (55:20.098)

Yes. Mitt Romney has a similar story, right? There's all these, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:32.408)

That's right.

Adam Nash (55:34.156)

And they did not have all their eggs in one basket by any stretch of the imagination. It turned out they actually had pretty big baskets as it turned out and they got bigger. So I like it, but I see all financial products as tools. And I like to do stuff around the house. I like tools, like I said, it's just a tool is good if it's designed to do what you need it to do, right? Like if it solves that problem. So I think self -directed IRAs, donor advised funds, 529 plans, these are all tools.

that if it matches with what your goals are and what you're trying to do, fantastic, you should use them for sure. But like, know, for retirement accounts, a lot of people just do very well with the sleepy Vanguard account. mean, Wealthfront's a fantastic option, know, set it and forget it and just make sure you're putting money into that thing so that that's one less thing you have to worry about down the

Auren Hoffman (56:16.587)

Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (56:25.006)

Now a couple of personal questions. Daffy's I think is the actually you're the first company you founded. Um, and I don't want to like reveal your age. don't even know your age, but like, know, you would be on the, you know, not the typical 20 year old founder that people like envision quote unquote, um, you know, college dropout type person. Like you've, already were CEO of a company beforehand. You had many leadership positions. You kind of worked your way up at Apple, as you mentioned.

What are your thoughts when you're giving advice to young people like, kind of found a company right away. Like, how do you talk to them? How do you advise them on their own careers?

Adam Nash (57:02.924)

Oh, that's a tricky question because you know, yeah, I've done well myself, like, you know, I can't complain, but at the same time, I wouldn't consider myself the pattern for anyone. There's a lot of different paths. You know, I've always been a little bit of a traditionalist. I think that doing a startup right out of the gate is risky in a way that people don't quite understand when they're just coming out of school if they're 20, etc. And, that is, you know, everyone likes to talk in Silicon Valley about learning from failure.

Auren Hoffman (57:12.716)

Right. Of course.

Adam Nash (57:32.396)

but it's actually harder than you think. When you try to build a company or a product and it fails, it turns out there's a thousand things you did wrong. Which one was the reason it failed? Causality. Everyone has an opinion. You have a team of five people, you'll have at least 15 opinions about what you did wrong. And by the way, there were probably, like I said, a lot. And so when you go to successful startups and successful companies, you get one advantage.

Auren Hoffman (57:41.454)

Yeah. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (57:51.736)

For sure, yeah.

Adam Nash (58:01.334)

that I think is phenomenal, which is you actually see success amidst all the things they're doing wrong. I cannot tell you how many things LinkedIn did wrong while I was there. It is such a long list, but you know what I learned? Those things aren't material to building a long -term, very successful large business because there are some problems, it's phasing, it's ordering, it's prioritization. There are some problems that you get to solve later when you're successful, and there are some problems that actually can kill you early.

Auren Hoffman (58:07.318)

Yes, good point. Right, that's a good point. Yeah,

Adam Nash (58:31.244)

And so I think

Auren Hoffman (58:32.066)

I, by the way, I love this. Like the tweet on this is, is, is like, everybody does so many things wrong and most of those aren't going to kill you. Right. And you just have to know what's really what to do, what to do. Right.

Adam Nash (58:43.744)

Right? And they're not material.

And so this is actually, by the way, the thing I see in the difference between people have been at large companies where they didn't build the system they're working within the system versus having to build the system that kind of zero to one, or even just, you know, find, you know, scaling, you know, kind of split scaling, et cetera. So my advice tends to be is actually the companies I like to route young people to, as I say, do a tour of duty or two at a fast growing, ideally in my mind, kind of mid -stage

Right? Like I used to always say, like we used to put up this list of well from, but even before that, a decade before I would tell people, look for companies that have figured out their revenue model. Like they probably have millions of dollars in revenue. They're growing a hundred percent year over year. And they're still under a hundred people. And the reason that's a fantastic place for young people to go is first of all, they're growing. Rapidly, which means growth begets opportunity for young people. If you're going slowly, they'll hire someone who has experience to do the

Auren Hoffman (59:29.336)

Yeah,

Adam Nash (59:44.396)

If you're growing fast, you don't have time for that. You can just raise your hand and go do the job. You may not be qualified for that job. You wouldn't get hired for that job, but the company needs you to do it. If it's growing a hundred percent year over year, the probability of you generating real value, equity value, you're going to see a 10 X over three to four years. That's amazing. Right. And you'll learn a lot in the process. And then the network of people at those companies always turns out to be phenomenal. Even if the company doesn't work for some reason, those people go off.

Auren Hoffman (59:48.674)

toy.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:03.106)

Yeah, credible.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:09.206)

Yep. Right, even if it blows up.

Adam Nash (01:00:12.596)

And so I tend to like to see young people do a couple tours of duty, not too much, but I always say like, then if you want to go start a company, et cetera, you'll have a network, you'll have some people. It doesn't have to take a hundred years, but I do like, a tour of duty to me is like two to three years, right? Taking a few years to learn. You'll see a lot of the great founders, even no one's looking, Kevin and Mike at Instagram, et cetera, right? Like they did a few things ahead of time.

I have no problem with people starting companies out of the gate. mean, for me personally, I'm a laggard. What happened for me is I just get excited about new products and new companies and technologies. I kept getting excited about things that I wasn't the founder of.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:50.892)

Yeah, yeah, which is great. Yeah, like you don't need to be a founder to have a huge impact.

Adam Nash (01:00:55.594)

But, know, once again, speaking to the Daffy founding story, you know, the two big reasons I founded Daffy was one, I really did want to start something. In fact, I left Dropbox, actually wrote a post about it where I said like, no, I'm going to regret not doing a company myself. The bar was pretty high. And I felt like Daffy was something that spoke to me. was authentic kind of product founder fit. And also I had a little bit of hubris.

But the hubris was I wasn't sure anyone else was gonna build this. And this is a way for me to have impact in a world. And I do believe that building products and building companies is a way to have impact on the world. And so that's my

Auren Hoffman (01:01:37.302)

Absolutely. All right, this great. Last question, we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Adam Nash (01:01:47.952)

let me see. it's tricky question because we can all think of examples where conventional wisdom is off, but conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason. Like in most cases is the way to follow. I would say, that the conventional wisdom I've run into, maybe that's just the LinkedIn background or that sort of thing. But, the most common conventional wisdom I've actually heard, especially for young people is this idea

Auren Hoffman (01:01:59.726)

Correct.

Adam Nash (01:02:16.362)

They should go off and graduate and do their time at a large incumbent company that they should go off. Well, now you'd say Google back in the day might've been IBM or might've been et cetera. And these are great companies by the way, there's nothing wrong with going to them. But this idea that those companies are somehow an unlock code for a successful life. It just depends what life you're trying to build and how you define success. But

Auren Hoffman (01:02:22.424)

Google, a Google or Microsoft or something. Right. right, right. Yeah.

Adam Nash (01:02:46.06)

I think that our system in general over programs people to believe that there's some sort of career ladder. Like, okay, I do this in high school and I do this in college and then I do that maybe grad school and then I go to a name brand company, et cetera. It's just been a very long time where that's what careers have looked like. Technology changes too fast. Companies change too fast. Innovation moves too fast. And so I think you have to have a growth mindset. And I think the real danger is when you go to these large companies,

There's a lie built into them. And unfortunately, a lot of people learn this in the last couple of years. People think, oh, well, it's, it's a safe job. No, it's not. They'll do layoffs in a second. They'll reprioritize in a second. I can't tell you how many people went to large tech companies the last few years. And then all of a sudden realized what I learned back when I was in college, when HP, the company that was the original Silicon Valley company and was never going to do layoffs like the HP way was never going to happen in 92 did layoffs and everyone realized, wow.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:22.126)

Yeah, it's definitely not safe. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:36.214)

You

Adam Nash (01:03:44.584)

If Hewlett Packard can do layoffs, anyone can do it. And so I think they make a mistake thinking that there's safety there. I think they make a mistake thinking that there's money there. And I think it's actually, unfortunately, one of the places where parents well -meaning, they just want what's best for their kids for the most part. I mean, I can't tell you how hard it was at LinkedIn. I actually did phone calls with parents. I actually got over it for recruiting. I literally like, I would offer to people considering us interns, et cetera. I'd say, hey, by the

Auren Hoffman (01:03:46.72)

Anyone could do it.

Adam Nash (01:04:14.452)

If your parents wanna talk, if they don't know anything about LinkedIn or what we're trying to do, I'm happy to talk to them. Some people took me up on the offer and I will tell you, it really helped because most people, once they learn what new companies are building and who's involved, et cetera, they get excited for their kids, et cetera. But it's, you know, I do think it's persistent conventional wisdom, this kind of idea of like step one is you're gonna go to a big giant organization, kind

Auren Hoffman (01:04:18.829)

Auren Hoffman (01:04:29.388)

Yeah, yep,

Adam Nash (01:04:42.22)

Do your time, it's safe and secure, and then you'll somehow live your life later. I don't think that's the right advice. This is why I like routing people, like I said, kind of that small, mid -stage, fast -growing startup, 50 to 100 people, 100 % year over year.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:54.594)

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's great. This is great. Thank you, Adam Nash for joining us on World of Dash. This is super fun. I follow you at Adam Nash on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. I've been a long time admirer of yours, a long time follower. So I'm really excited that you joined us on World of Dash.

Adam Nash (01:05:14.198)

Listen, Aron, obviously known you for a while and big fan of yours as well. So I appreciate you having me on the show.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:21.102)

Amazing.