$500M Founder: Avoid These Critical Mistakes When Competing With Incumbents - A convo w/ Daniel Simon, Coast CEO

Lots of times you see something get funded and they're going up against like a negative NPS sort of old crusty incumbent like kind of like the ones you're describing, but then you realize it's really hard. You know, you look at like net sweep or sales force or like some of these things and they're just dead startups all over the place. What do people get wrong about going up against the non-innovative incumbents? There are startups out and jump up on the table and say like the incumbents are idiots and we're disrupting everything. We don't have all the right answers. We don't even have all the right questions, right? The fact is that those folks who don't treat their customers particularly great who don't innovate have still built incredibly full featured platform. In some cases over the course of years or decades you'll say hey we're going to do this cool new innovative thing and then they'll come back and say well yeah actually we tried that 10 years ago. So they might not be as dumb as they were. Exactly. What else should founders be doing? Find a real differentiation. Okay this is what I was hoping you'd say. You don't have to be better. You just have to be different to win a part of the market and here the challenge is to not take. All right everyone welcome to the I/O podcast. I don't know what number we're on now. We're probably close to 20 or something. Sterling and I are stoked to be out here in Utah with Daniel Sime and the founder and CEO of Coast and we've got a bunch we want to talk about including the fact that Coast is going to open up a Utah office. We're going to talk a little about that in your history but yeah thanks for joining. Man we're glad to have you. It's always ways to see you guys. Thanks for having me here. We originally met what three four years ago. We're surely in our both angel investors in Coast. That's right and very helpful angel investors at that. Do you remember my pitch? You said I remember very well your pitch. You'll be I will be the greatest value per dollar invested of anyone on your capital. And he's come through. Let's go. Let's go. I mean I think I did like 10 grand or something so it was the denominator small value was high. Sterling put in like what 30 grand. You got the greatest value per dollar. It's tough to compete. Tough to compete with 5K. Anyway glad to have you. For people who don't know you or Coast can you just let's kick it off. What does Coast do? Give us a quick overview. Sure. So Coast is a commercial payments business. It's expense management software and a charge card a business credit card so similar to the likes of ramp or Brexit or near and dear to your heart's divvy. But very specifically focused on the needs of companies that operate fleets of vehicles. So if you run a plumbing business or an HVAC company or construction business you're giving the technician who works for you the company credit card when they take the van out to go do their job. Well you need to really precise like control and security and reporting. You want to make sure that they're buying the right grade of gas. They're not going into the community store to buy cigarettes and chips. They're not using the company credit card to fill up the gas tank of the family car sell gas to the guy behind them in line. You need this pretty specialized software. There's a couple companies in the US that do this. They're huge. They're hugely profitable. They don't always treat their customers all that great and they're built on 40-year-old technology with not that much innovation since. So there's an opportunity now for a number of reasons to do something better and that's what we think that we've done. How'd you come up with this idea? Why did you focus on this? Maybe talk about what you did before Coast as a precursor but yeah I mean and it's a pretty sort of connected narrative I would say. It's my second startup. I previously started a company called Bread which is a consumer. I think what the kids call now. Buy now pay later. So if you guys know companies like Affirm or Karnas, it's very much in that category. That was a venture capital back business like a series ABC. Bessamer was our largest investor from the series A through the exit and we ended up selling that company in 2020 for around 500 million to an issue of store credit card. So it was a happy outcome after a number of years of hard work. When I left Bread I knew I was going to do something new in Fintech. I had all this experience and credit and payments on the consumer side. But I didn't have the thing that was exciting to me. So I kicked around for a while. I was an advisor at a handful of startups. I was an entrepreneur in residence at Silicon Valley venture capital firm. It was actually pretty great after like six years just like laser focused on the problems of one business to be like well what's everybody else working on? What are the other problems and challenges out there? What's exciting? What's not exciting to me in Fintech? And I always wish that there was some romantic story. I always wish I could say that like I was playing with toy trucks when I was a kid. I wasn't. I was playing with computers. It's really as but now that just like in the context of all those conversations you know some VC said to me hey Daniel used to take a look at this company called Fleetcore and I was like what's that? And then I looked at I was like oh my god I haven't been able to think about anything else ever since. And so I end up sorry in this company in 2020 been off to the races. I looked at a lot of stuff in 2020 like a lot. Nothing got me anywhere near as excited as coast. What was it? Well it was a lot of the same kind of a rhyme with the stuff that got me excited about starting my first company bread more than 10 years ago now. Like you have this massive market that by the way in 2020 very few people in tech and VC were really thinking about that's yeah with huge margins that's dominated by this niche all gopally of a handful of players that don't treat their customers particularly well but it's solving a real need and pain point for a massive sector of the economy with a business model that's proven to work at a huge scale before the incumbents are not technology companies. They don't have innovation in their DNA and look at that pattern. I feel like I've got to be able to build something absolutely huge here like I felt the same way in 2014 starting bread about the store card issuers as I feel about the fleet card players today and that just got me super excited. So this is actually an interesting question. Lots of times you see something get funded and they're going up against like a negative NPS sort of old crusty incumbent like kind of like the ones you're describing but then you realize it's really hard you know you look at like net suite or sales force or like some of these things and they're just dead startups all over the place. What do people get wrong about going up against the crusty non-innovative incumbents? Look I think like a way to think about it is just like having respect for the fact that these folks really pioneered in many cases perfected a category. Like there's startups you know at our company humility is a bit of a watch word and like there are startups that jump up on the table and say like the incumbents are idiots and we're disrupting everything we don't have all the right answers we don't even have all the right questions right. The fact is that those folks do have negative NPS who have horrible customer service who don't treat their customers particularly great who don't innovate have still built incredibly full-featured platform in some cases over the course of years or decades they're embedded with their customers lives they built integrations since the rest of their operating stacks they have brand awareness no one ever got fired for buying IBM like it's a really challenging thing to try to say like that you're going to just take on in many cases to your point about sort of the road of history being what are what the corpses of some of these companies are tilting at windmills here. So for us it's about sort of really understanding I spent a lot of time both when I was starting this company even before I incorporated and ever since then speaking with current and former executives from the incumbents to understand you'll say hey we're going to do this cool new innovative thing and then they'll come back and say well yeah actually we tried that 10 years ago and here's the challenge doesn't mean you're not going to try. So they might not be as dumb as they were exactly and frankly there's a real benefit to incumbency that's really hard to dislodge so I think you just have to approach them with humility and recognize you're playing catch up like you're not leapfrogging them on day one they're going to have a million enterprise features that'll take you 10 years to build and you just have to sort of like hold your head low while you try to build them. So I love this let's even go further down so step one is be humble recognize you can't beat them up day one you need to do it incrementally what else should founders be doing if they're going up against a incumbent other than being humble what have you guys done well find a real differentiation. The thing is that like so first off differentiation in general I mean it's not like a surprise to anybody that like you don't have to be better you just have to be different to win a part of the market right. There's going to be a some set of preferences somewhere in the market that wants your way of attacking it you solve this particular thing that they care about which is why by the way I really care about verticalized solutions going after particular industries don't try to win the entire market I've got a better credit card but these incumbents are also vertical are they not that's right and here the challenge is to not take the way that they've built a product and assume that that's the only way to do it let me give you an example from our business historically the way that fleet cards and fuel cards work is the way that you get additional data things like a domita readings identifying a driver ID or a vehicle ID is with that little dial pad that's on the gas pump like when you go to fill up when you put in a fuel card it'll ask you for that driver ID and VIN and vehicle ID and PIN and a domita reading etc and that's a really problematic sort of work flow because the drivers hated they forgotten the adometer and the freezing cold of cab and like you know they're hitting 9999 that for the manager the data is all wonky you can put the card in the wrong vehicle and the data ends up screwed up so when we sort of looked at this business we're like look all of these companies came into being the products were invented when nobody had a mobile phone in their pocket what can we do with the fact that now it's no longer the case so by SMS or via mobile app we can collect information out of van for a more secure and authenticated way of doing it we can make the cards fungible and interchangeable because people can check into them and out of them using an SMS space workflow it was completely innovative and novel the problem is that you know you talk to customers and they're like well where do I put in the PIN and the in the the the fuel dispenser I'm used to doing that so it takes a while to break out of the mold of the way that the product and the market have historically been conceived but if you can do that and you kind of force your way into the market with something that's different then it's very easy to not just be like hey I'm a slightly different version of what's out there I can say I'm a 10 times better reinvention of what's out there and even if I'm not full featured enough even if I don't have all the integrations even if I don't have all the enterprise features it's it's new and it's not just comparing apples to apples it's creating a new category of your own I think this is this is like the it's not novel everybody knows you want to be different not better but you get pulled into better like we have a negative NPS and we're just going to treat people better it's like they're not going to come to you for that they're only going to come to you if you're different and you have to you have to force a choice force a choice do it that old way or do it this way and at least then you're going to start to see like where you have product market fit and where you don't what can scale and what can't and I'll say like it's a it's a challenge for an early sales team right an early sales team is going to come to you and say I can't sell this stupid mobile thing like all the why can't we just do the pin thing that's the customers are just I could sell the product if you just gave me the thing and so you have to sort of like have like you have to listen to the market but you have to have some confidence in your product vision and why it's better there's a famous Henry Ford wine of asking your pastor horse that's where I was going to exactly and and and so you know it's obviously you need to listen to the customers you have to do product and your product leader you have to have the best practices of doing the user research and the customer surveys but there's an element of taste and vision particularly in the very early days of a new business and a new product category where you have to kind of shoot from the hip somewhat all right so let's actually go through that a sales rep comes to you is like hey Daniel or head of product they want it the old way and they love everything about coast except they want it the old way how what did you do in that scenario did you just say no we know this is better did you ignore that type of customer how do you get over that so it's funny so for the most part the answer is the latter we say we're just going to dequeue some people who are just not going to be right for this particular opportunity and this is a matter of taste right you better be right here because you're making a bet exactly and if you so our very first account executive and we cannot talk about how we start to sell the product in the early days but our very first account executive who you know was a couple years out of school he's now senior AE and he's just crushing everything and like he's absolutely amazing in the early days he'd say like you know he asked people at the company he's like who designed this stupid effing thing and and I was just like it was me and I was like because like he's having these conversations with folks it's an immature product and it's so radically different from the expectations of the customer and I was just like push on now that's a funny looking horse exactly now that same person will say it's amazing how the product is evolved and the stickiness of the customer who knows they can't just go to somebody else in the market and incumbent in the market and see that they can get the same kind of value that we've created with this reinvention of the product from somebody else it makes the product so much stickier and the churn so much lower as a result of that differentiation that now they're thankful but yes like you know you have to sort of fight against internal rebellion about doing something that the market is pushing back against yeah the other thing you said too that I think is worth calling out is in some ways when you're when you're trying to be different in some ways you're actually worse you don't have all the features you're missing a bunch of stuff but you're different and so it can work and I think that's the key is different different different forces of compare or choice better forces of comparison exactly so if we go backwards a little bit in your journey what are the main learnings from bread to coast and like you know how how have you sort of translated that how are you better on V2 that that sort of thing so I'm going to go on for like a little bit here so indulge me for a second because it's a lot yeah boil six six years of learning exactly so like look it's a lot easier the second time for me personally I'll say like it's easier for a few reasons one we were successful exit you know like the first time around you know as I was building this business I was seeing all my friends from like law school and business school like building great careers and finance law business what have you and I'm sitting there like looking at this company that could go zero any day and I'd be back at square one every time we would go and raise money our sort of main competitor would show up and say hey here bread's raising money how would you be interested in acquisition instead and you know I was always like sold and Michael Fatter is like whoa whoa whoa whoa we're not for sale and it was good because we ended up having a good exit these days like you know if coast goes to zero I'm going to be fine it's not going to go to zero but like that allows me to focus on building the business in the way that I want take like a bigger swing a longer time exactly yeah second you know obviously I get the advantage is a repeat exit founder of job candidates investors partners of additional credibility but the other thing and this goes really to your question is I kind of know what I'm doing like the first time around like you can read all of the books about what you're not supposed to do and I read them all and I made mistakes anyway and it's like a touch hot stove that's how you don't do that sort of stuff like in terms of hiring the wrong people firing too late like all that stuff in terms of very specific things though I will say there's a few things that we did wrong and a couple things that we did really right the things that we did wrong I was to micromanaging particularly around the product where like I was not like giving enough control to a product managers to really own the mission that they were meant to drive which alienates great people I underestimated the value of engineering management and its own capacity for permanent product focused organization and what product velocity drop which to me was the sort of the biggest learning because if that differentiation that we were talking about earlier ends up shrinking then it's every sales conversation becomes about price every retention conversation becomes brutal you have to be the place where when someone catches up to where you are you're already white years ahead because you've been adding so much value and there's always going to be competition there's always going to be hangers on the thing that we did right though if when I look back on it what I'm proudest of without a doubt is like the people and the culture that we brought to bear in service of the company's mission my co-founder nine that business we share at a certain set of values about thinking big putting the customer first understanding risk it ended up translating into a series of behaviors that we looked for encourage and rewarded the company we talked already about the humility and sort of like having to look to others and learn from their lessons as well rational inquiry everyone at the company has to challenge one another and be challenged by one another but always in a respectful spirit of collaborative debate to get to the right answer for the company transparency with one another with our customers like technical excellence hard work and just like being nice people like you get one life to live you spend most of your waking hours at work it should be fun I like to think that we're replicating that pretty well at coast but don't listen to me like it could be delusional talks to people actually work here but that's the foundation of everything else that we did and so like having gone through that the first time and sort of seeing how powerful that was like that that just reinforced doing it all over again very cool well I love it we was sterling and I were talking about this you've raised from a bunch of people that we know I mean two of the three people have led your rounds we know very well for those who don't know coast coast raised money from btv so Jake and sheel who were like our fifth podcast episode and then at the series a was it Rebecca an insight it was Rebecca an insight along with Ameth Kumar from excel excel as well okay so inside excel and then most recently last year maybe a year yeah in summer of 24 let raised from iconic was it iconic growth arm iconic growth exactly that was a 40 million dollar series be it led by yunky okay so I mean quite the track record of investors I got a bunch of questions we could dive into but for founders who are listening and aspire to attract that level of investor I mean the obvious answer is just build a great business but is there anything specific you could say you've done this time around that is other than being as successful first time founder and building a real business what have you done to attract such good investors so a few things I'll say one it's not quite the question you're asking but also how you pick those investors I would love to know that too so when when we started I came to the conclusion that which is something that I talked to founders about a lot these days and you know my waiter stage investors might hate me for saying this but like I think that seed rounds should belong to seed funds and and maybe you guys agree or disagree but like to me I really wanted to have the value of a weed somebody who would be able to sort of really be involved in the company and also be able to support the company when necessary but not like sort of just be an option check for like a giant sort of boot ship Silicon Valley firm that didn't have a prior relationship with me so within that structure I really focused on finding people who had a reputation for being partners to a founder like you know everyone talks about founder friendliness and some people say it and other people live it you mentioned sheel and better tomorrow venture sheel and Jake you know when one of my friends who's the founder and CEO of a company called Albert which is a sort of consumer personal financial management he and I go back to the eighth grade math team together he heard I was doing something new in FinTech he was jumping up and down saying that I needed to go and meet sheel because he was saying look sheel's first money into his company so many years back you know $150 million of capital raise later from like all these boot ship firms sealed the most helpful person in the boardroom and so I got to understand sheel on got to speak with sheel and Jake on very sort of personal level over the course of time and really felt I could do business with them so that was how we kind of ended up getting started in terms of how we attracted for the capital what I've done is a little bit unconventional I think there's this sort of like why combinator style classic advice you're either in fundraising mode or you're in building mode and you should get done with the first one as quickly as you can so you can get back to the hard work of the second one I think that's baloney like I think that like what I end up doing is I'm always in low key fundraising mode I'm always spending maybe an hour maybe two per week speaking with the people who could read the next round in the next one telling them the story and having them come back and see wow they're actually doing the stuff that they said that they were going to do the last time seeing that momentum seeing that trajectory seeing the story actually play out according to the strategy that we like put in front of them in the prior meetings has gotten to the point where the other rounds that we've done have never actually been me doing a formal fundraise they've been the folks I've gotten to know over time having done the work on the company coming to me saying we'd really like to partner now what would make sense to make it happen and that's turned out really well for us over time how do you manage those so does that look like you talking about numbers and metrics from the first from the first time you meet somebody and then they come back and sort of see how you did like or or you more just getting to know people and nurturing them along or is it sort of very transparent metrics driven hey we're not fundraising but we're at this much in revenue and here's what the metrics are and you kind of like let them understand things and then have time to get comfortable with it because I think one thing one thing that's been interesting is we've had a bunch of these convos is can you get to know somebody when their whole job is just to understand how your business is doing and if they should be giving you money or not like how do you think about speed dating versus like having a long relationship that eventually culminates in in a funding potentially well so let me give you an example I met somebody that you guys know well we're back at insight in the middle of 2021 now this is a little I'll get to your question on metrics in a moment because this was actually before we'd even launched a product and you know at the time I think a lot of people heard fleet in venture and thought truck which is not our business we don't do sort of the heavy duty tractor trailers hauling stuff over the road for lots of reasons that's not our target market but when I would talk to venture capital investors they would say well why aren't you doing trucks those are bigger right Michael thank you for that trenches and now this is what those reasons why I'm in this part of the market when I met Rebecca I was not fundraising and I wouldn't fundraise for we didn't do the series a for several months after that but I met her and I told her a story and I explained to her that what I was selling was software and she instantly understood it because of her experience with you guys at divvy and she was very smart and very quick learner but she understood like I wasn't coming asking her for money I was coming to her with the understanding that one day probably would ask her for money so then like and she ended up colliding the series day and has been an incredible resource to the company ever since but we were able to build that relationship in a manner where I was telling the story she was understanding the story doing her own research to get comfortable with that story even after we launched the product and we started to grow the business and the products been live in the market for about like almost three and a half years now the conversations short metrics come up but metrics is only one part of it it's also about complete like repeating the story over and over and over again helping people understand what is the near term opportunity and how we're going after it tactically and how we see it flowing through in the metrics and then you know you're still as a startup in the early days by definition you're small and those metrics don't add up to all that much quantitatively but you use them as a hook on which to tell a story to repeat it to understand what is the big vision behind the metrics that you're already achieving saying what your near term plan is so you're setting yourself up to be able to say the next time you speak and here's what we've done that I told you that we were going to do the last time and also getting to know one another you meet some people like in doing this that you don't want to do business with and you kind of like learn that over the course maybe not just of one meeting but over two or three and that itself is a valuable learning but again one if you've done that then once you are ready to raise and somebody comes in and says hey would you like to be able to do something here you can call up the folks that you do like and who have been tracking the company say hey you told me to tell you if something was happening well it's happening do you want to be involved in this and again that sets us up for success at least in my history with this company very cool yeah we had a conversation with Garrett Langley who runs flock safety and he runs a similar process where he keeps a tight circle fairly updated and then the benefit to that and for folks folks who watch that episode you'll see the the crossover here is that you've got them warm and you've got a relationship and then when you're ready you go to them and they also feel like oh Daniel's Daniel's coming to me and he wants me as opposed to some like hinge like speed dating thing where no one's really opted into each other in a real way they're just swiping right or left and there's a relationship beforehand and look I'm saying something that's a bit of a cliche but like you once you do this you're stuck together right like you for years I mean these are the people who are going to be in your boredom I consider the people in my boardroom to be my friends I hope they feel the same way about me but like you know we might not always agree on everything but these are people that I became very comfortable that I would have to work with for a long time over a long long dating period in advance of actually getting hitched one other topic I'd love to cover and then I think maybe Sterling has one or two more as we get close to the end here is do you recall how you got your first 10 customers yeah we talked through what you did there did you how much had you built because FinTech's different than some SaaS company what did you do to get your first 10 so this is a incredibly good question um let me talk about a few things one it's hard to just launch in FinTech I'd be interested to know how long from like when you know Blake and Alex like raised their first dollar for Divi to when you actually moved a real dollar of a customer with the product how long that was at Brad my first company from the moment we raised our initial friends and family funding to the moment we moved a dollar for a customer with the product it's 15 months and when I started the second company I was like I'm smarter now I have all the partners like I know what I'm doing from the moment that we raised money for coast to the moment we moved a product of moved a dollar with the product for a customer it's 15 months so like maybe I could have done better worse but like but the point is that that's a long period it's a sort of like incubated idea and we were talking about taste and vision a lot of faith in taste and vision you spend that time obviously recruiting customers obviously doing your research getting proxies the way that we got our first customers was idiosyncratic and they'll say something that's a little different about the way I've done it early on then I think what people are told to do one like even in our space where we're selling to plumbers well one of our investors had an associate at her firm whose sister was friends with a guy who was the kid of a plumbing company owner and that was our first customer right and then like our second customer was like another fintech company had a risk employee who like rana sort of local delivery hot shots business on the side so like very sort of idiosyncratic not what you would sort of expect like we weren't just pounding the pavement the way that we got our third through 10th customers though was not by me doing it like everyone talks about founder led sales and there is has to be founder led sales in both my first company and my second one my first company I think about my co-founder and I both realized pretty quickly we really don't like sales and we suck at it and so we hired people we hired a ease very very early on to sell the product and in SMB that's not actually all that crazy right we hired somebody I mentioned before that somebody who was like a couple years out of school had been an SDR and like sort of very early in their e-career helped them to help us to discover the market go sort of like open the phone book go find some plumbers you know I go the good thing is it turns out there's a lot of landscapers plumbers HVAC installation companies and limousine drivers and like whatever out there to go talk to and you know for me I think it would have been very difficult even though I can sell a hundred million dollars of equity to like you know all of these investors I stand in front of a plumbing company owner and I'm like what if they say no like you know I'm just like not really good at it and it's okay to like have other folks help you to figure out how we're selling what's repeatable what's workable and you don't have to like necessarily stick to the dogma founder was how do you make sure that if you're doing it this way you know you're kind of outsourcing sales early on which again like something Tyler and I don't really recommend and I think most people wouldn't how do you make sure that you're not losing the product learnings that allow you to eventually find product market because early stage founder sales is just product post product management yeah I would look even in those early conversations you know that the salesperson might bring me in so yeah I'm there but honestly like I've actually found that like through sort of a culture of a lot of transparency within the organization and sort of the right kind of note-taking and sharing I get a lot with even sort of a level of indirection between me and the customer I know that this is like an at the mine yeah this is this is blasphemy my my my board hates it like they're just like Daniel you need to go spend time with the customers I went to pest world in Hawaii which is the the conference of a sort of exterminator industry because I said to the board and sales team I was like what if the customers are in Hawaii I'll go see the customers but generally speaking like I'm probably quite guilty of not doing enough of it but I still think that like I have enough context and knowledge of the customer both through the stuff that I do firsthand but also through what I'm learning from the people whose feet are on the ground about the customer to build the right product again I know it's controversial but it's worked for us so far and one thing you learn is there there is no one way to do anything there are things that mostly work most of the time but there's no one correct way to do anything everyone's got some idiosyncraticism yeah start-ups are the ultimate practicality test if it's working he probably should do it so let's talk about that how's it working tell us a little we ask people to brag a little bit is there a stat or something you could share about how coast is doing that tell so many gallons of gas we're talking about it it's it's a lot I mean like we we have hundreds of thousands of cards in market we've got by the end of this year we'll be serving the better part of like 10,000 businesses and those businesses to give you a sense of it that's everybody from a four million dollar revenue 20 truck HVAC installation business and we've got thousands of customers that look like that to like companies with hundreds of vehicles or thousands of vehicles right I was just earlier this morning since I'm here in Utah I've figured I'd visit some customers I visited zero res like they're like sort of a carpet cleaning and and duck cleaning there I think like 400 vehicles plus another 400 in their franchises coast customer and a db customer by the way you know we even have customers quite a few of them with like thousands of vehicles in their fleet so we're growing quite quickly and until larger and larger customers we like to brag about our NPS you mentioned sort of the incumbents our NPS is often on a trailing 30-day basis as high as into the 70s right and this is in a category fleet payments where NPS is uniformly negative in some cases deeply deeply negative and and and the sort of a flip side of that as well our customer is generally speaking I know this is kind of a cliche as well but like to the first approximation like never leave us so like you know like like it is like fairly accurate to say that a customer who's fully onboarded to using coast will not voluntarily stop using coast and that's one of the things that like I'm like laser focused on like the second that like you know in our weekly meeting they say this customer has stopped spending as much I'm just like well well well you have to figure out what's going on where are we failing the customer but I'm proud of what we've done so far where where does coast end up I mean you're that you've already done this before you've had a great exit what are you trying to do now what's the vision and then we'll ask you one or two more and we'll wrap up there yeah look my vision for coast is to become the financial platform for the future of the trades and transportation like this is I mentioned like something of a wedge product you you have like this very like specific need but like there's so much more that we can do for the complex financial lives of our customers we started with a fuel card and only worked for gas stations we got to understand our customers risks transactions behaviors we started to give them really precise controls to set policies on who and their fleet can spend how much wear when first on the kinds of field expenses parking and tolls and car washes parts and maintenance extra supplies at home depot that really took off now we're rolling out corporate card and expense management where you can use virtual cards to pay your vendors for the supplies from supply houses online for your construction jobs and now we have expense management solutions we're rolling out bill pay our customers care about driver payroll the care about operating capital solutions business banking insurance maybe even vehicle using and financing this is very specialized vertical specific tailor made product of the fleet payment solution can be a wedge to build a more holistic financial services platform for the industry that's very exciting you look at the incumbents that I was talking about the two biggest ones represents something like thirty five billion dollars of enterprise value between the two of them that's the tip of the iceberg for what we can do as a software company operating off of a queen sheet of paper to me like the opportunities are pretty endless I modeled the company in many ways after the sort of hospitality payments business toast like you know it started as a card reader you know what's so special about that well works in restaurants you can drop it you can get wet it really understands the tables like it's very specially designed for the needs of one particular kind of industry but with that wedge they manage to add that payments product so many different software solutions behind it to grow so much of their footprint do so much for the financial lives of their customers that's the model that we see and I think the opportunities are endless in a market of you know half a million businesses and our ideal customer profile in the United States alone there's endless things for us to do very very cool the last last question we asked everybody is what we call the golden spur question it's like what makes you the way you are when all your friends were off law school orthodontist like you know and you're starting companies like and you're doing it again at the second time like what what makes you the way you are okay I enjoy hard problems I know that that sounds um tried but uh I um I think that FinTech is a very hard problem um you know it's very messy is it's not like you've got like walls and regulations that weren't designed for the kinds of digital experiences we're trying to create for our customers you've got entrenched incumbents aging infrastructure to bring that all together and abstract it from the customer you don't just need great software you need like finance capital markets risk analytics like operations servicing collections crazy we go and regulatory compliance stuff obviously the go-to-market functions and software and engineering like to make a look to the customer like there's nothing going on but there's all this complexity under the hood that creates engagement lifetime value not everybody can do it I feel that like through my sort of experiences and pretty idiosyncratic background even before this I feel like I can and I get like a lot of thrill out of that but you know over my career like the thing that like has really sort of in in startups has really motivated me even more is that you go from the hard problem of building great FinTech products to the harder problem of building like great high functioning mission driven organizations right and in doing that and having done in one company and now doing it at coast it gives me personally like a ton of leverage to drive a lot of impact like I want to build something big I want to build a business that impacts the lives of these millions of workers in these trades and transportation businesses to create as much value for them as my customers and as much value for my shareholders as possible so we've a really like sizable and lasting mark and that just gets me very excited every day well as a couple of those very small shareholders we are thankful I'm doing my best for you I'm doing my best no promises but I'm working for you this has been awesome my daughter's college fun but don't worry about it thanks for the time man this has been great I'm styling that tires it's always awesome to see you guys thanks so much