Passive Investing Australia: Get Rich Slow, The Fintech That Tells You to Trade Less | Hayden Smith, Pearler

I think I had no money because I just had this bicycle crash. Hayden built a company that tells you to invest, then leave it alone. He started it broke, kept his teaching job at UNSW, and built it slowly on purpose. Patients probably has a much higher dividend outside of immediate financial outcomes. Like give you a more patient with things in life you'll generally just have happier days, better relationship, whereas it's hard to skill your way through. And that startup built in the premise that boring compounds over 100,000 managed accounts and 1.5 billion in holding. Hi, my name is Hayden Smith. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Perlour, and this is Founders in Motion. Every other platform in the market is trying to pull your customer's attention. New assets, new features, alerts, reasons to login. Perlour's pitch is basically set it up then ignored. First off, like what is Perlour and then secondly, how do you keep someone committed to the boring thing when the whole industry is designed to make boring feels wrong? The high level of Perlour, as we describe ourselves, as the finance app or the wealth management app for the new generation. Our job is that people can have a bank, they can have a credit card, a debit card. They get paid from their job, they go and buy their groceries, they pay their bills, then they've got money left over. And our job is to take every dollar of that money left over and put it towards a better, brighter future for them, their family, their kids, their grandkids. That's the crux of it. In terms of how we keep people on the journey, a huge part of that's always going to be about goal setting and painting the picture. I have this fairly strong view that once people understand how their actions can lead to something better, they can keep doing it. So the same is true for health. Let's say someone goes to the gym, they want to lose one kilogram. Once they realize that if they eat a certain way and then they lose a kilogram, it's like the rest is really easy. So a lot of it for us is just trying to help people get started, get on the journey. Because once they see that they say $1,000 and that they get this $50 dividend every year, or basically $1 a week coming into their account, it's like, oh my god, that makes sense. I can see this journey now. I just need to do that more often. There seems to be a whole gigantic education component and also making sure everyone gets that reward pretty quickly at the beginning. How do you think about that when you think about product design? A lot of us just talking to customers and trialing things out. For instance, we used to have all this kind of complicated goal set ups for people. And we've changed that now to say, if it's your first time investing, we're not going to set a Y for the goal. We're just going to say, that's just $1,000. Keep it really simple. Because no one who's starting investing has an idea of what they really want a lot of the time. Like, yeah, they might say I want to retire or something, but they don't really have a number in the head. They don't know what that number means. They haven't really thought about it. So just keeping it really simple is like a huge thing for us. In general, there's so much in finance that's complicated because people just have involved it to make it simple. I'm starting in my investment journey as well, and it is really daunting. I have a finance degree, so I should be very financially literate. But all the things that we learn about are pretty inaccessible to people starting out with small sums of money. So if I were to log in to Perler right now, what are the types of products I could be investing in? We have products that help you invest for the long term, so you don't have to work forever, basically build up a portfolio for a typical Australia. That's going to be like $1 to $3 million over many decades that they can live off, particularly before retirement as well. There are like ASX and micro-products. We have our super-product, which is much more like after 60. Because a lot of people don't want to be like wait until they're 60 to have financial independence. They want to be able to maybe go part-time in their 50s, so they need to build that up outside of super. And then we also have another product that's really focused around investing for your kids, because that is a big part of some of people's objectives is to build a nest egg for their kids, so they don't have to stress too hard about what's coming in the future. Before Perler, you had a bit of a business. There was a MillKit comparison platform, Compare Meals. And you don't talk about it often, but take me all the way back there, like what happened with Compare Meals? What were you trying to do and where did it end up? We started off trying to make a business where it was easy for people to eat together and split the cost. We found that that was going to be quite difficult to make it. We ended up transitioning towards a business that was then just focused on MillKit, Mill delivery services. We saw a market opportunity because of the fact that these things were skyrocketing in popularity. And no one had a place to frankly just like compare them. And we thought, wouldn't it be good if we could just capture that and capture the audience interest? So we literally just built a website focused on SEO. We were inscribed all the data from these companies manually. We put it all in. And then our objective was to quite literally just do what Finder and stuff do, where we gatekeeper, we get a bunch of traffic in. And then we say, it's going to be cheaper for you to pay us for the traffic than it will be to use Google ads. Because we've got good, qualified people coming in. And the crux of it was pretty good. We got the business going. We mostly just ran out of stamina. We got fatigued. We didn't know how to raise capital. We didn't think we wanted to. We just were very inexperienced. And we started making some revenue, but it kind of just fizzled out a little bit towards the end. Obviously, there are lessons there that will learn that helped in a business like Perla, but you've got to go through it the first time, make those mistakes. But the principal of it was a good business, but often like a good business idea is only a tiny piece of the puzzle too. So those are really great takeaways. So from this first business, what do you think you've learned that you really brought into Perla? There's a lot of little things. Like one good example was when we started Perla, I was probably the least fussy about equity, because I'd been in a startup that had kind of gone for a while, and I'd watched people argue about equity. Kind of seen the manifestation of that idea of 100% of 0.0. So I kind of went into Perla being like, that's a distraction to me. I still tell founders to these days, I generally think equal equities the way to go. And that says like a clear power dynamic, because the second you make things unequal for like what is a generally equal relationship, it creates like strange perverse incentives and distant incentives for people. So you have like it's a 50/50 co-founder, but I've seen some place recommend where one person should have 51% and the other person 49% for easy decision making. What's your perspective on that? You can pretty much answer every founder question by looking into questions you'd have about romantic relationships. We'll say like how do you find your co-founder? I'm like, I don't know, how do you find your life partner? Like you just spend time in the world. And the more time you spend in the world and the nicer you are and the more interesting you are, like it would just kind of happen. You know, it's not like you say, you go to this place on Friday night and you will find your future husband. And but it's kind of similar to the 51 thing. Like there are types of relationships out there that thrive in their like a quality in their partnership dynamic. There are types of relationships that thrive when there is a power dynamic. Or there are different roles that people have. You know, there's no right or wrong answer there. Yeah, 51 could work. I think it's just no matter what happens nearly every single time I've seen a dynamic. If someone has 60 and the other has 40, that person who's got 40 will work less hard eventually. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing people miss. It's like, it's all happy at the start. But then like, you know, when you're under the pump and it's Saturday and you've got a lot to do and you're co-founder who has more equity than you isn't working. Yeah. You know, it's really easy to just not work. Yeah. And that will kill the business. Perlis philosophy is all that going slow. But you raise external capital. Yes. And with external capital, investors have expectations. So growth, timeline, eventually in exit, I can imagine there's a version of Perler where the philosophy around getting rich slow and growth levers are pointing in different direction. So have you had investors who want to come in and change the way you operate? One of the reasons it's hard to go quickly is because there's a lot of inertia and finance. People don't change what they're doing as much. But that has a benefit on the flip side that you also have a much lower turn. So like, I think investors are smart enough to see that. Is that, yeah, okay, you might grow slower than Duolingo might be able to grow. But on the flip side, most customers tend to stay with you. Like we see this with the superannuation at the moment as, you know, superannuation products growing slower than our other products have grown historically. But also, the number rate at which people will be leaving superannuation will also be much lower. Because that's why it's hard to get them on because for the other super companies, they're not leaving them too, because it's such a sticky product. So I think I invest the same pretty good at understanding that that's just sometimes the nature of finance. But there's always more you can do, particularly for the easier product, special. - Yeah, what about like investors who are not on your cap table, they wanted to come in, but they were like, oh, only come in if you like, I don't know, start trading crypto or stocks, whatever. - The mood changes a lot. Like it's so interesting, you know, we went through the crypto phase. It was like, what are you doing in crypto? And then that died out. And then it kind of became the AI phase. And then it's still the AI phase a bit, but I think like back in 2024, it was very like, like, what are you doing to keep up with all the open eyes of the world? - Yeah. - And now there's a different proportion of the energy which is more like how are you gonna make the business more efficient or how are you gonna do this part of AI? We're starting to see that people are starting to, to some extent, re-appreciate the fact that we are a fairly stable business, the fact that we're not a type of business that AI is gonna eat. So in that sense, it's like the way investors feel about you kind of comes and goes and I'd say, you know, it often oscillates. - Throughout this entire time, you've held on to your role at UN SW as a lecturer. So a lot of founders, especially these days, shed everything that isn't the company. - Yeah. - Why have you held on to the role? - Oh, in the early days, I needed the money. Like when we started Pearl or I think the first three and a half years, I put money into Pearl. You know, I put less than my co-founded Nick, but yeah, it wasn't making any money from it. I had very little money when we started Pearl or I think, I actually think I had like no money 'cause I just had this like bicycle crash and I paid all my medical bills. So I was like negative money basically. I was negative money in the sense. I had like five grand, but I had like a surgery coming off that was like more than that in the next couple months. So at that time, I just needed the money, you know? After a while, like I think once we started making money, it was less about like I would do this for the money and it was more like I'll do this because it's, as if you care. This one is, it's just helpful to connect with so many students and the uni generally. - Gives you young in touch with the generation that you're serving? - Yeah, like if you go back till 2019, you know, I think it's something like six or 7,000 software graduates in Australia in the last six years of having to be taught by me at some point. And it's like, that's like a lot of people and that's like that's practically useful. It's personally fun bumping into people. It's usually motivating, which I think gets you to the second point, which is like I don't have children and I think I find this really funny as someone without kids 'cause like people often look at founders and whenever founders have to do kid stuff, that got that makes sense. But then if they do a non-kid thing, like it's seen as a distraction, it's healthy for people to come home to something that's broader than their startup. You know, I've only seen a few of them in my orbit, but some of the really like the most worst case mental health cases you've seen with startup founders, they're often young people I find. So I think it's like the shortest explanation I give is like a mental health hedge. It's like an easy way to think about it. It's like to have something where, you know, sometimes it's a really crappy work day and I'll go to the uni at 6 p.m. and I'll lecture for an hour. And it perks me up seeing all these young people excited to learn about computing. And then sometimes the students will be very difficult and annoying and then I'll go back and do some work with my employees and I'll just realize how smart and talented they are. And I'll be like, you're amazing. I appreciate you all so much. So it's just a way to break up life. The argument to go all in gets stronger than the later you get, which I think a lot of people have this image of like the best way to start a company is to go all in. And it's like it depends what type of company. Like as a lot of companies you just can't do that many productive hours. Leave your health tech or a fintech. - It's gonna take some time. - Just next time. So the idea of like going in from nine to five before you've launched a product is like crazy 'cause you're just, you're gonna be making on BS work. And then that's just gonna stress you out that it's not achieving anything. The aim is to work as hard as you possibly can for all the work that matters. I'm feeling that with AI a lot is I'm doing like, less teaching, less personal hobbies, less outdoor activities than I've done in a long time because in April of 2026, I feel this existential changing point with AI. And I feel like uniquely right now more than ever is me just spending literal like, I'll spend hours on my Sundays just using it. - Yeah. - You know, whereas like two years ago in 2024 I was like, yeah, I don't really see what I'm gonna do with this yet. I was right or wrong there, but like now I'm like, oh my god, I can see the dividend of the time I'm putting in. So I think it's just good to use common senses to win is the right time to just completely go crazy with it all. - Like I think everyone has this notion where like AI can help you do your work better, which is true, but then you just feel like holy shit because I can do so much work. I need to do more stuff. - Yes. - It is actually, it doesn't really help you spend more time doing other things. It just makes you have higher expectations for yourself. Well, that's the funny part I think people miss is like, the next 20 years are terrifying in my view, but they're like 30, 40, 50 year case for AI is extremely positive. 'Cause like once we figure out all the crazy things we can do with it, it's gonna enable us like nothing else, right? And that's that feeling I think. 'Cause like realizing like when you see that opportunity, like I this yesterday, I was like, we could build games. - Yeah. - Like I could just make a game, like an investing game. I could never do that before because intelligence wasn't commoditized like that. - Okay, so Hayden, you've built Perler for people who want to do the boring things consistently. Do you think patience is a virtue or skill? - It'd be hard to look past skill, but a lot of people don't have skill or access to it, I think, or like they might have the access to even through their natural temperament, through their access to resources, through their life circumstances. I think what's tricky is that patience probably has a much higher dividend outside of like immediate financial outcomes too. Like give you a more patient with things in life, you'll generally just have happier days, better relationships and stuff like that. Whereas it's hard to skill your way through some of those. I tell people that's my, that's like the coolest part about getting older. 'Cause like, being older demonized a lot for me is like, I, as I get older, I feel like my capacity to understand patience gets improved because I've had to wait for stuff. And I realize as well that things will solve themselves, which also helps my stress levels too. Like when I talk to a young person, they're like, "I have this problem." And I'm like, "Well, it's fine." You just like, wait it out. Like when I'm dealing with a difficult employee, if I'm 21, I just want it to solve today. Whereas like now I'm kind of like, "Oh, it's okay, we'll sort it up by Christmas." Like these things take time, or things take time. If you want to grow the business, it's going to take another few years. Like all of that stuff. And I think that is one of the coolest parts about aging generally is you've just seen more. So you're like, your ability to, like I think aging makes you more patient as a general. - I mean, one thing I really like is that like a lot of smart spare things, I feel super random in the moment. Typically ties up into a beautiful little bow. - Exactly, yeah. - At one point. - Yes. - So that's another example. Like the older you get, the more likely you are to kind of just see like, this is probably going to be part of something that I'll understand later. - So, okay, if someone is so young, they have an H yet. - Yeah. - How do you think they can like add more patience when everything else is going like a mile a minute? - I think the way to solve most things in our head is perspective at the end of the day. So the more you can do to get perspective is great. This means like talking to different kinds of people, going to different kinds of places. Like I'm a millennial, so I don't want to fall into like the like travel is self-actualization trope. But it's like. - I've learned a lot in my travels. - Yeah. And just doing stuff, you know, it's something I think about a lot is like, how often do I talk to McDonald's shift workers these days? When I was 17, I did a lot because they were just like around, but then it's like your career kind of hyperfixates you and the same area. I miss uni because you're just hanging out with all kinds of different people. And before uni, I hang out with people that won't even gonna go to uni. So I just think broadening your perspective, however the hell you can go read like, I'm generally like a fairly left-leaning voter. I love reading right-wing news. Just 'cause I'm like, what the hell is this stuff, you know? And it's like whatever you can do to do that, I think that the flow and effects of like your patience, your understanding, your stress levels, your like all those things will I think often fall into place if you can get a good perspective on as much as possible. - So you've probably picked up a ton of wisdom, but you have to say like the 1-1-1 thing that when an eager early founder come to you and ask for advice, what's like that one piece of advice that you would give them? - Make sure you save more money every year than you started it and make sure you're learning as much as you can and that you say yes to as much as you can. I don't know that sounds very like generic and not start-up-y, but I think it carries pretty well. - Generally carries share a lot of aspects in life. - Yeah, 'cause it's hard to kind of give start-up advice because it's so really awesome credit. 'Cause it's like giving relationship advice, you know? It's like somebody will say, "Oh, communication's really important in a relationship." It's like, well, yeah, obviously, and it's like, okay, what was common values are and like a common understanding of the future? Like, you could, there's like so much to unpack and like different dynamics of different people in different situations would mean that certain things matter more than others. But for me, it's like, if you just keep learning and you just keep saving, saving is obviously a bias 'cause like I don't come from like a wealthy background, so I found that as long as you're saving at least you're not going backwards. 'Cause a lot of people, I think, like a lot of financial, a lot of start-up struggles do end up being about finance at the end of the day. I've seen it firsthand, people over-leveraging on their start-up and they're like meltdowns 'cause they're like, I've screwed myself financially. I like sold the house and we don't sell the house to start the company. I'm like a very pessimistic person in that regard when someone's like, I'm all in. I'm like, unless your parents select worth millions $1 and we're just like guarantee it all for you. Like don't take huge bets. - Yeah. - So you know, keep your life stable is what the shape more is. And as much as you can then yeah, just keep learning. - Well, thanks so much. Hey, Dan, this is great. - Yeah, thanks, yeah. - That's a wrap. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, love our production, and bring on new series you'll wanna watch. And if you wanna hear more early stage builder stories, check out our other episodes. Okay, see you next time.