Samir Vasavada (Vise) - From Teenage Founder to Tech CEO

[MUSIC] >> Welcome back to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series. My name is Emily Ma and I'm an adjunct lecturer here for Stanford School of Engineering. The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series is hosted by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which is the Stanford Entrepreneurial Engineering Center. It's also hosted by BASIS, which is the Business Association for Stanford Engineering Students. Okay, so today I'm so thrilled to host Samir Vasavada from vise.com here. He is the co-founder and CEO of Vise, a technology-powered asset manager that uses artificial intelligence to help financial advisors build, manage, and explain personalized portfolios for their clients. Vise manages nearly $19 billion in assets as of today, across thousands of individual client accounts with a team of world-class engineers, PhD quant researchers, and investment strategists. Co-founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mahotra also started Vise when they were 12, 12 years old living in the Midwest. I don't know what you were doing when you were 12, but I think I was coloring coloring books. They bootstrapped the company for several years before raising a single dollar, and then they have since raised about $130 million from top-notch VC firms including Sequoia Bounders Fund. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Prior to Vise, Samir and Runik actually had a company called NYX Development, and they were consulting leading financial firms such as UBS, BCG, MassMutual, and Deutsche Bank on artificial intelligence, and they were building apps software and other software to help these businesses. So Samir has been featured in Forbes 30 under 30. He's been covered in Fortune, TechCrunch, and many other publications. Please give Samir a huge round of applause and welcome to ETO. Okay. Well, let's start with Vise. Let's start with the company Mission. So you're aiming to get financial freedom to everyone with this personalized automated intelligent platform. You're working with a very special set of customers, RIAs. For the audience who might not be familiar with what an RIA is, what is that and what does a Vise do for them? Yeah, for sure. First, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be at Stanford. RIA is, think about them as like a human financial advisor. Your parents probably have an advisor. They probably help oversee their assets and help them make financial planning decisions and estate management decisions. The vast majority of mass affluent wealth in the US, an affluent wealth is typically associated with the financial advisor. The interesting thing about the financial advisory wealth management space, it is one of the biggest markets in the world. They manage well in excess of $80 trillion in just the US, $160 trillion globally. So it is one of the biggest markets that's oftentimes kind of overlooked, but it's historically been around. It's been 100, 150-year-old plus business. So what does Vise do for them? Yeah. So advisors and our long take on Vise and the thesis that helped us originally start this was, if you had asked anyone in Silicon Valley in 2016, 2017 what is the financial advice landscape look like in a decade or two decades? They would say financial advisors do not exist. Humans do not go, clients do not go to a person to get their money managed. They go to a robo advisor or Robin Hood or self-direct. We knew that wasn't true. The reason why we knew that wasn't true is because for so many clients, especially kind of affluent or mass affluent clients, they want a person to talk to you about their money. The thing is, this person is really good at helping them give life guidance. You can almost think about them as like a coach, a marriage counselor helping make your biggest life decisions, and managing money is just how they get paid. The challenge is that these people are oftentimes not the best people in the world at managing money. They can sometimes give pretty challenging financial advice, and it can have long-term negative implications on the client functionally, because they have to kind of make this trade-off. I can manage a lot of clients and I can put them all into kind of a one-size-fits-all, fairly generic, not all too tailored portfolio, or I can manage a handful of ultra-high net worth clients, and I can give them a very bespoke personalized portfolio. Our whole belief is that all advisors should be able to deliver all clients a personalized portfolio that's tailored specifically to their clients' financial goals that will get them to their long-term financial goals across asset classes, all powered by technology, and technology is what makes us powerful and makes us possible, and before vice, we felt like there was no technology that was serving this close to $100 trillion market all too well. >> That's crazy. So basically, you're up-leveling every single RIA out there. >> Yeah. >> Regardless of who their customer is. >> Exactly. >> Right, which is phenomenal using technology. >> Yeah. Ideally, it kind of democratizes the wealth gap. So if you think about it, it allows advisors to service any type of client. They're not necessarily limited to who they can service, and they can service them better, which better basically means more people can send their kids to college, more people can buy the home they wanted, more people can retire when they want because they have better financial advice. >> Yeah, hugely. Making every dollar go a little further with good financial advice. So now we know what is happening today. Let's roll back to when you were 12, which was actually not that long ago. Tell me a little bit about what was going on when you and Runeek started with all of this. You were sleeping on floors, you were bootstrapping. >> We didn't start vies when we were 12. We started our first business when we were 12. >> Okay. Well, let's start with that. >> Vies, we started at 15. But our parents, I don't know if any of you guys had to do these programs growing up. Our parents are like, "You can't go to traditional summer camp. You must do college courses." So they sent us to Northwestern and we did the CTD program. >> At 12. >> At 12. Actually, earlier than that. Our dorms happen to be across the hall from each other. We're really bored. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in Detroit, Michigan. We're like, "How do we make money? How do I escape this school system?" I hated it. IOS just had created the Swift programming language. So we taught ourselves how to program. Our idea was let's build apps for small businesses. So we posted a bunch of job ads on Craigslist and a bunch of different job boards to say, "We'll build your small business and app." We got a chain of gas stations. We got a medical conference. We got this company that was like the Angie's List of Canada, and we just built a bunch of mobile apps for them. We learned how to program. We then found a team in India that we found online that helped us build some of these apps. By the time we were 13, 14, we'd made $30,000, which was an incredible amount of money to us at the time. We had this interesting opportunity because Runeck was so smart, and he had this interesting math background. He was so far ahead for his age in math that he had this research opportunity at a very well-known university to work in their AI lab because the professor there had said, "Hey, I need students to help me on math research for some of these interesting AI problems." He was working on restricted Boltzmann machines or a type of neural network. We had this idea, what if every small business could get an app? What if you could type in an app idea into a piece of software, we would put all of this code into this neural network, and we would functionally allow the software to be able to build apps for you. The AI would be able to build apps for you. This was going to be our first startup. We took all the $30,000 we made and put it into building this business, like AI-powered app development. This is before the attention is all you need paper came out, so before there was a bunch of big breakthroughs in LLMs and transformers and all these great things, we were trying to understand what looked like the precursor to the transformer to see if we could use and build apps. This turned out to be a really difficult technical challenge, and the only people we could convince to work for us were these people we had met on the Internet, one of whom hacked into Sony Media and went to jail. The other one was like some scam artist in the UK, and we just had the all the wrong team, although it was a total mess. But one of our advisors at the time had said, "Look, you guys have learned so much about AI and machine learning, you should start consulting with these investment banks through these expert consulting networks." So, Gross and Lyman Group and Coleman Research, a bunch of these expert consulting networks resisted to connect to buy-side investment banks, and private equity firms, to experts to learn about specific topics, and we called ourselves experts in AI, and got a number of these consulting projects. We consulted with all these different bulge bracket banks, and we are charging like $1,000 an hour, and one of those projects was with MassMutual, and we found a way to make more money than just the one hour phone call, which was to ask for after-work and do a project for them. They had said, "We have this huge wealth management group. All of our financial advisors are really good at relationship management. They're not the best at investment management. Is there a way we can use AI to help make them better at investment management, and help augment their investment management capabilities?" We thought, "Well, rather than consulting with MassMutual, what if we built this software and sold it to the MassMutuals of the world, sold it to the J.P. Morgan's of the world, sold it to big investment institutions, and it would be like AI-driven portfolio construction and investment research." It was originally called FS AI, Financial Services Artificial Intelligence, and we had worked on it, bootstrapped it with our consulting income, which is built on our own, and there was a Detroit Startup Week project, and Runeck was lucky enough to go, and J.P. Morgan was funding the project, and Jamie Dimon was coming to speak on stage at Detroit Startup Week. I said, "Runeck, you have to rush him on stage as soon as he gets off, and you need to pitch him on this. This is our big break. This is how we're going to get out." Jamie gets off stage. Runeck runs up to him on stage. He says, "Jamie, this is what we're building. We're going to build AI for J.P. Morgan. It's going to help you guys build better portfolios." He had said, "Look, J.P. Morgan, we have a lot of data scientists. We know what we're doing, but the thing you guys should look at is all these advisors are breaking away. They're leaving big institutions like J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch." He didn't say J.P. Morgan, but his competitors and going independent, and they're creating these independent RIAs, and trillions of dollars is now in the independent RIA channel, but they need software to power their practices. So we're like, "Okay, Jamie said this. This is what we're going to do." Every day after school, and I was a sophomore now in high school, I would just call independent RIAs. I'll cold call them. I post the job ads for independent RIAs and a bunch of people applied, and I would just call them and it's like, "How do you think? How do you make decisions? What tech stacks do you use? I just want to understand the psychology about them." The two things I learned is they really care about their clients, and making money and growing their business, and they're very lifestyle-oriented, and they don't really want to spend too much time on actually building portfolios. Automation and allowing them to spend their time on what they care about is really, really important. So there's a clear opportunity with all the growth in the market, and with the problem set to build a great business. So we started to build a business, and that eventually became vise, and we had bootstrapped it for two years, and it was my junior year of high school. I said, "I'm going to leave high school, and I'm going to go just for the summer to San Francisco." And the only place I could get, and the only money I had to really afford it was in the Tenderloin. So I live there. I don't know if any of you guys know where the Tenderloin is, but it's not the friendliest part of town. And we had a small team. We convinced people to kind of bootstrap the business with us. We'd all kind of like sneak into this "we work" and work there. We did this for like two, three years. And the plan was, you know, I was going to... I was not really planning on going back to high school, and my parents were pretty frustrated about it, especially knowing Indian parents. But my co-founder was supposed to graduate high school and take a leave of absence from college, or not go to college and go work on the business with me. But he invites me to this grad party he's having, and just kind of announces, "I'm going to U Penn. I'm doing this fancy M&T program. I'm going to do it." And I'm like, "Well, crap. What am I going to do?" Like, my parents don't like me. I have no grades. I'm like living in the Bay Area on scraps. There's no way I'm going to, you know, I have to make this work. So, you know, U Penn starts, you know, first day of kind of freshman class, and he has a single dorm room. And he had this mattress topper that you put on top of his bed that was like three inches thick. We put that on the floor, put a sheet over it, and I lived with him in his dorm. And I said, "I'm not leaving until you drop out." And I have the record, probably, for the most guest passes at U Penn. So he would go do classes during the day. I would usually sit with him, and we'd like work on the business. And then at night, we'd work on the business together. And his parents had said, "Look, if you guys raise a million dollars, and like, who's going to give these two idiot kids a million dollars, you guys can take like a short leave of absence and work on this business." So, we had gone out and we had pitched a ton of investors. Everyone's like, "What business do you guys have building a software company in the RIA space?" And I'm like, "Look, we're already three years into this thing. We're going to make it work." And we ended up meeting these two guys, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who started Flatter and Health, and they'd sold it to Roche for two billion dollars, and they'd went to Penn. And they said, "Look, we don't know if this thing is going to work, but we'll give you guys a hundred grand." So, they gave us a first hundred grand. And we ended up meeting the Founders Fund crew and Keith Reboy, and he decided to give us two million dollars. We're like, "We beat our parents' goal. We got two million dollars, and we're going to move back out to the Bay Area." So, we moved back to the Bay Area, and Roonek comes with me, and we start to kind of scale the business. So, were you allowed to take twice as long of a leave of absence because you raised twice as much as what your parents asked you to do? Oh, not really. Roonek just realized that it was so good, like, you know, having freedom and not being in college. I basically kind of framed it as like, the real world is actually better than college in a bunch of different respects. He didn't believe me for a while, but then I convinced him otherwise. I have a question for you going back to when you were 12. When you and Roonek met, how did you know you could work together because you two have different skill sets, it sounds like? At the time, it's funny because like, we didn't really get along all too well when we were at the summer program. We did, but like, it wasn't super noticeable. I just, I had an idea for an app, and I didn't know how to program at the time. I learned, but Roonek said he knew how to code. He wasn't a very good programmer. So, Roonek would actually told the truth and, you know, said he wasn't actually a good programmer. I would not be here, but he said he was a good programmer, and he could build me my app. So, that's how we, that's how it happened. I think the other story that I love from what you just said is, you posted a bunch of jobs on Craigslist or whatever it was to get the RIAs to respond. So, when they realized it wasn't actually a job they were applying for, how did they respond? It was super clever. Because some of them, there's all these like, growth hacks. I probably have to relearn because I unlearned some of them that was really helpful when we were starting. This was one of them. I posted a financial advisor consultant job ad. So, like, people thought they were applying for a job to be a financial advisor. I actually ended up hiring a few of those people. So, our early founding team was a few of these people. I just didn't have any money to pay them. So, I gave them some equity, which turned out, it worked out pretty well for them. But they actually worked. So, one of the advisors, there was a guy named Rob Owen. He had sold his financial advisory practice and he had a little bit of cash. So, he like had a conversation with his wife and he's like, "I'm going to swing for the fences and like join these guys." And it was Rob and I, you know, we worked for a long time. We ended up doing the same thing with a few engineers and convinced them to just work on equity for a long period of time. Wow. Because we don't have any money to pay for them. Right, right. Well, okay, let's talk a little bit about that. Because you were able to do a lot when you were, you know, in your teenage years, right? You had the hutzpah to go up to Jamie, oh well, Runik did run up to Jamie Dimon and have this conversation. Like, how did you find that courage and that bravery to do that so young? So, I think it all starts with this idea of creating kind of a vision for what you want to be. And I think I did this at a very young age, like eight or nine years old. Like, I know exactly what I want. I want to build a great business. I want to do it over this time scale. Like, this is what I want to look like in 10 years, 20 years. And it's when you have that vision in your mind and you have that thing that you're kind of constantly trying to reach for, you will find a way to kind of not give up. So, if you can like really create your own original vision that like you want to strive for, it will kind of push you to do wild things. And I think that was kind of what it was. And Runik the same? Runik did not. Runik's track was he was going to end up being a professor. And like, he was going to be a math researcher for a long time. I took him to the dark side and said, no, capitalism is actually the path you should go down. And he ended up getting addicted to it. But, you know, it definitely took a period of time. And for a long time, our parents were so against it. Because my parents wanted me to be a doctor. His parents wanted him to be, you know, a professor. And, you know, they actually blocked his number on my phone. So I had to like, luckily FaceTime Audio existed. But like Verizon, it would block his number. They didn't unblock it until like, you know, probably like a few years ago. But I ended up changing my number, getting a new, paying for my own cell phone plan. But they really, really hated it. But they didn't know how to get it to stop. And he didn't really have anything better to do at the time. So because I was kind of so persistent, it ended up kind of working out. Well, I'm saying he was actually quite generous to you by letting you sleep on the floor on the mattress pad. So you were able to be persistent every minute he was in his dorm room, and every day he was there. Well, it was the only, you know, there was no plan B or plan C. Like it was, there's only one plan and it had to work. So if this didn't work, I didn't know what else I was going to do. Well, let's talk about that spirit, right? Because one of the things that you and I had chatted about is the dark side of money, right? So a lot of folks here in the Valley think, oh, if we raise a lot of money, that's going to give us a lot of certainty, we'll have a lot of runway, et cetera, et cetera. Tell me about the dark side of money and why you waited to raise. So we waited to raise, it's kind of an interesting situation. We waited to raise for a long time. We probably bootstrapped the business all in all and we're like a small seed stage company for, call it like, five years. So a pretty decent amount of time. And then we went from like having a seed stage company to being a unicorn and having raised well over $100 million in an 18 month period, which, you know, now there's companies that get funded and they're like that off the bat, but back then in like 2019, 2020, that wasn't really a thing. We didn't have companies go from seed to unicorn in like a year. Like it wasn't a common thing. So we didn't really know how to kind of adjust the way we thought about money. For a long time, we were in capital conservation mode and that was probably a bad thing. I remember we had an incident with AWS. We spent $4,000 on AWS like overages and we wanted to refund on the money. So I called Founders Fund and I said, "Delian, I really need this AWS money back. That's $4,000. I'm kind of freaking out." And he's like, "Sir, we gave you a lot of money so you could spend it and like grow really fast. Don't worry about this." And like that was a change in my mental model, but then we kind of over-correct it because then we raised $100 million and Sequoia had given us a bunch of capital and a bunch of other, you know, well-known great investors had given us a bunch of capital. And we said, "Okay, well our job is to hire really quickly and to scale really fast." And all of the founders we had spent time with, I had spent time with all the kind of famous DecaCorn founders you guys can all think of, and they had all said, "Your job is to hire a team and it's to be a leader of leaders and to grow as fast as you possibly can and the way you grow as fast as you possibly can is you spend a lot of money to get there." And that couldn't have been worse advice and all the VCs had said that advice. And there was two things we learned. First, it was their incentives to say that advice because if you were a VC, you want to deploy as much capital as you can, buy as much ownership as you can, dilute, you know, the cap table as much as you can so you can charge more and more management fees and deploy more and more company than cap table. So, you know, that was one kind of set of, and you want the company to grow as fast as possible and you believe that deploying capital. The second thing is, you know, hiring people, there's usually like a set of strengths a particular founder has that is why the company is able to be successful in the first place. And then the founder stops spending time on those strengths towards other things because people tell them to and the right thing to do is for the founder to double down on those strengths not to outsource it to people that are not as good. So the conventional wisdom was you hire an executive team, that executive team will take over things like sales and product and engineering and all of the things that made you great in the first place and you focus on managing those people. The reality is most of those executives, if they were good at it, would have been founders themselves and are quite frankly not good at it and you're going to churn through them in like a year or two and your job is to focus on those things that you are good at, product and go to market and building the business. It's kind of what inspired the Brian Chesky founder mode idea but we had kind of learned that the hard way pretty early on. Well, you know, it's interesting that you bring this up, that you also mentioned that you had hired from big, big well-known tech companies and these executives came in with their own playbook but ultimately you as a founder and your founding team and your earliest employees knew what the right playbook was, not just copy pasting from another firm and you needed to actually develop that talent from within and give these people a chance rather than hiring from the outside and those folks basically bringing out the outside playbooks. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so eventually, so what happened right after we raised our series B and our series C is that VC sat down with me and some of the founders that we were really close with it also invested a lot of money into the company, sat down with me and said, "Smir, your job is now to be a manager of managers and we're going to introduce you to this guy, he's one of the most famous executive recruiters in the world and you're going to put job descriptions out for a new CTO, a new VP of sales, or chief sales officer, a new chief people officer and all of these existing people you have, they're not going to be able to scale so you need to hire people who can scale and those people have probably led big orgs today. So now we get on the phone with these executive recruiters and we pay them like 120 grand per bed so it's like not cheap and they put us in touch with tons and tons of people and we're like basically like most of them just weren't that great and then we finally found like it was two months into each of the searches we're like the executive recruiters are trying to push us to hire someone and we just find someone and we're like, "Okay, we're going to hire this person" and that had happened or the opposite had happened and they'd said, "Hey, you know, you guys are never going to be able to get some like, you know, the person you really want had led this 200 person org at Dropbox or at Google or Meta and like you're never going to be able to work for you" and then I would say, "Oh, you think like I'm going to convince them like, of course, like you're putting a challenge on me, I'm going to go hire the person" and we had like wind and dine these people and done whatever it took and then we had convinced all these like hotshot very senior executives to kind of join the company. So very quickly we had our founding team that kind of built everything and we kind of pushed those people out of the way and we had brought in someone who had ran a 200 person org at Dropbox, someone who ran a 200 person org at Meta, someone who built a 150 person org at Trip Actions, all these different companies and each of them said, "Hey, Samir Rudik, the way you guys are doing things today is wrong, the way you should be doing things is the way we did at Dropbox, the way we did it at Meta, the way we did it at Trip Actions" and all those companies were like post-product market fit companies, they had like found product market fit, these people had joined way into the journey, they were basically like building on a machine that had already worked, they weren't in the discovery process of product market fit and like kind of starting to scale product market fit. So they had brought all these playbooks that were not related to each other and said this is the way to do it, they didn't take the time to understand the customer, they didn't take the time to kind of understand the business, they said, "This is the way you do it" and then the first thing they did was let's go hire 30 people, 50 people, so we started hiring all these people and if you look at the incentives of a lot of these executives, they wanted to be able to say, "I joined from this company to this next company and I'd scale the team from 0 to 200 or 0 to 500 and that is the conventional marker of success, I'd raise these many dollars" not like I had created this profitable business. So we started hiring all these people, we started using all these playbooks and we very quickly realized our time wasn't spent on the things, sales and product and all these great things, it was managing VCs and then managing all of these executives and different people felt uncomfortable about different things and they were all remote and no one wanted to come into the office and it was just a mess. So I just realized at the end of 2021, luckily we had a lot of capital, we need a kit reset and we just need to like fire all these people, so I fired every single person myself, I'd gotten to Zoom, one day I fired like 100 people, just like Zoom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and I had just said, "Okay, we're basically going to start from scratch, but with 100 million dollars" which was great and we had taken all of these people that I didn't expect to be leaders in the organization but if I look at my executive team today, my leadership team, it's all these people who did the work, it was like someone we hired as a client service person today built our entire enterprise function and he was like 24 year old, we'd hired a Guggenheim at the time and he had been a client service person and then taken on a little bit more and a little bit more and I call this homegrown talent and like the reality is like the people that are going to be just as invested in the business as you is your founding team and it's growing that talent and having them take more and more responsibility in the organization than finding people externally who are mercenaries and they don't care about your business as much as you do. That's an incredible story. Hot take. My God, very hot take. So it's interesting to me that you are so, so aware of incentives, right? So incentives of the VCs, incentives of people coming in from the outside and I think that's a really, really valuable lesson that I just want to reinforce for everyone, right? What is an incentive of the person you're working with? Whether they're a partner and a customer or a staff member or an investor because sometimes those incentives don't align with where you're trying to go, right? Yeah, most of the time. I mean, the, there's a classic Charlie Munger quote, I think it was Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett, like you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome and every single thing I do, I look at trying to understand what is this person's incentives and like how do I align them so I drive the right outcome and the same thing with customers, right? You can pitch a customer on, you know, look at my product, look how great it is, look at all these features we have, this and that. But if you don't show a customer, hey, you really care about saving more times, you can spend it on the thing you care about, your clients or being able to service more clients, you can go make money and aligning your product to those incentives, to those benefits, you're not going to be able to be successful selling. It's as simple as that. So going back to an earlier part of this conversation, you mentioned that as a founder. You have to make sure you preserve and continue leveraging the unique strengths that you have that make the business work. So as you now have in a segment of team, what are the strengths that you continue to lean into that you preserve because you are uniquely suited to do the best? Yeah, my advice on this is as a founder, your job is to be selfish and be happy. It's crazy as that sounds because if you want to be really successful, you need to build a business for a long period of time. There's no, even though you read about it in the press, this person started a company. You probably have the classmates at Stanford who have started a company overnight and they've raised a lot of money and it looks from the external side, but they're really successful. The reality is, it takes a long time, decades to build a truly generational, transformative company. So you need to figure out how to be happy, how to put yourself into a position to want to build that company for decades. And it also means being selfish on the things that you're good at and orienting the company around your strengths and not focusing too much on your weaknesses, otherwise, you were going to burn out. If you made me sit down and program, I would just hate my life and I would quit pretty quickly. Versus focusing on the things that I was good at, like enterprise sales, driving strategic partnerships, evangelizing the vision, understanding what the long-term product strategy and approach should look like, recruiting the best talent and understanding how they all fit together. I focus on all of those things and my co-founder and my leadership team, everyone focuses on everything else. And I still try to stay in the details and try to understand what they're doing, but I'm not trying to spend time on things that I'm just quite frankly not that great at or don't want to do because I know I'm going to resent my life and if I resent my life, I'm not going to want to work on this for two, three decades. Man, powerful. Okay. A couple more questions. So, same sort of lines of knowing incentives. Right now, AI is really hot. People are raising money because they have some sort of like, you know, name that involves AI. But you have talked about not chasing the hot thing, right? So how do you stay disciplined as a company? I mean, you spoke a little bit about actually delivering value and benefits to your customers. How do you keep everybody focused when there's so much buzz around AI? And you were kind of an AI company. Yeah, we were. One of my kind of contrarian takes, everyone's like San Francisco is the best place in the world to start a company. And like you, if you want to start a company, you should go to San Francisco. My actual take is I think San Francisco is one of the worst places to start a company. And the reason why it's the worst place to start a company is because people are constantly chasing after the hot thing. And if you take the framework that it takes a long time to build a successful company and you're going to go through all these different ups and downs, you can't be in a position where everyone around you, it's constantly chasing whatever hot thing is currently happening. So for example, I lived when I lived in San Francisco, after I lived in the Tenderloin, I lived in this house called the Crypto Castle. And the first ICOs were built there, Vitalik had lived there at one point, I was living in this bunk bed, it was pretty awful, but all these people were working on crypto projects. And then crypto was no longer hot, and SaaS FinTech was really hot in 2018, 2019. So then everyone jumped to SaaS FinTech. And then that dropped off, and everyone was jumping to remote work startups. And like, I'm blanking on the company, but these companies raised huge amounts of money overnight, and then if you look back a few years later, they're zeros, they're dead. And the companies that have been successful just picked one interesting market thesis that no one else was thinking, everyone thought this was like a, you know, this space doesn't make sense, I'm not going to go work on that, it was kind of a contrarian idea. But they turned out to be right, and they did it for a long period of time. So my take is you need to be in a place, in a position with people that are going to look for that contrarian idea, and you're going to look for that contrarian idea that no one else is going to work on, and you need to functionally be right about it over a long period of time, and you need to stick at it for a long period of time. Versus starting the same company that everyone else is starting, whichever LLM company for this, or AI coding bot, like there's going to be, there's already 30 or 40 of them, there's probably going to be even more of them, and like one might win, but even then, like who knows. The company that really will probably win is the company's been doing it for the longest, which is OpenAI, or the companies that have been around before the thing was hot. So I more think about it is take a contrarian viewpoint, and wait until the wave eventually hits, and you will be really successful as a result, rather than doing the same thing that everyone else is doing. So let's go back to the zeitgeist, and all these other people who have opinions, but also are drawn to the buzzy thing. What is the role of mentors and coaches in your life? How do you know how to integrate their guidance? There's times where you're like, "Oh, that's not useful at all," and there's other times that people have come into your life who have helped you in meaningful ways. How do you discern what's useful and not? Yeah, so this is something I really screwed up. I had had this, I was really privileged. For a long time, I didn't have any access to advice, and I just had to learn things on the internet, and that's how I kind of learned my initial kind of startup acumen. And then we'd started raising money from all of these really famous, powerful, successful people, and I had too much advice, and I didn't know it at the time, but I thought my job, and part of the reason why people liked me was they felt like I was very coachable, and I'd listen to their advice, and I'd hear them, and I'd ask them a lot of questions. And I'd started getting advice from all kinds of people, like the founders of Google were giving me advice, and all the different Sequoia partners, and every founder of every huge company you can think of was giving me advice, and I was building this great network, but I was all through getting all their advice, and all of their advice, I didn't really realize it at the time, but some of it was contradictory to one another, some of it just did not apply to this type of business at all. It was completely disconnected from reality, and it was relevant to Google in the early 2000s, but it's not relevant to VICE today. And I had just taken this advice as gospel, and said, "Because this person is really successful, I'm going to take this advice, and I'm going to implement it." The reality is, most of the time, people think, "I can't do this unless I have a mentor or someone giving me advice, or someone kind of supporting me." My reality was the things I had to do is just figure it out on my own, and most of the breakthroughs were because Brunick and I, or our early team, had go talk to customers, and spent time actually looking at and understanding and observing the problem. We figured it out on our own, and that's what pushed us through, not getting some advice from some billionaire out there who we thought knew the answer, which quite frankly usually didn't. Well, Jamie Dimon was right. You know, Jamie Dimon was right, so we're giving credit on that. We're all wrong. I mean, it's funny because the company's success was almost inverse to how much time we spent with VCs. When we spent a lot of time with VCs, and we were going around talking to all the VCs, becoming friends with all the VCs, I would hang out with VCs more than I hung out with my friends. I was doing, Vice was doing not that great, and then once I stopped talking to the VCs and just focused on the business and said, "I'll talk to you when I need something." Everything worked, and it was just great. All the numbers. It's perfectly correlated. If you take my calendar and our asset growth, it's perfectly correlated to not talking to VCs. Wow. Okay. Do you have mentors and coaches today? I do. My biggest one is this guy named Matt Mochari, who is one of the most famous, successful executive coaches of all time. The reason why his advice was great, he wrote this great book called The Great CEO Within. He coached Sam Altman, and Brian Armstrong, and all these awesome people, is that he has all these interesting frameworks. He's not saying, "Hey, Samir, I think you should do this with your go-to market, or I think you should do this with raising capital." He just said, "Look, I'm going to teach you how to communicate with people." Most of the time when you're in an argument with someone, it's not your job to just get to a resolution and argue with them back. Your job, half the fit, is to make them feel heard. The way you make them feel heard is you repeat what they have said, and you make them feel like we're on equal footing, and I understand what you're saying, and you understand what I'm saying, before you push to get a resolution. Things like that, the other communication frameworks, other operating frameworks, things that have worked well, that's where I really learned and relied on people who had done a great job. That was tremendously important for my development as a leader, as a founder. Then there were certain specific areas where I had said, "There's a company that looks like Vyze," or I aspire it to be like Vyze, and I think this person is particularly really good with hiring, or this person is really, really good with go-to-market and sales, because this company looks comparable to Vyze, and their sales motion is comparable to Vyze. It's oftentimes not from the most senior person in that company. That was another big takeaway. Spending time with the CEO can sometimes be helpful, but usually there's someone who's lower down in the organization, who actually did the work, and will have more interesting insights and advice and breakthroughs that will carry us to our next thing than the top-level leader. I love that. I think you're a contrarian through and through in so many ways and where you find the useful bits here and there. We're going to end with one final question. Normally, I would say, "What do you wish you had known when you were 20?" Since you started your company so early, I'm going to rephrase that question as, "What would you tell yourself if you could go back to have a conversation with the 15-year-old version of Sameer?" I mean, I would have told myself to, "My life framework is pretty simple. It's like, think really, really big. Think as big as you possibly can, and don't give up until the job is done, and iterate in the process to getting there, and you will eventually be successful and things will eventually work out." I think that if I had to give myself some piece of advice, it would almost be, people put an overemphasis on being liked, fitting in, and trying to get everyone to like you and be a people pleaser. I think more Gen Z is like this, more and more and more, and they're trying to please their parents, and they're trying to please their university, and they're trying to please everyone around them. I had done this for a while, which is I want to try and please my investors. I want to tell people what they need to hear. I want to please my customers. Because you need to have a take that you believe so strongly, and you are kind of stubborn in it through and through, and you're not trying to make people like you. You're not trying to get people to buy into that belief just because you're trying to get you to buy into their beliefs. You want to just follow your own path, follow your own vision. I think I would have really tried to understand that and take that to heart more, because I think I wasted a lot of time trying to get people like me. Love it. You owned it. You owned the vision that you had, and you gave it energy, and you invested it in versus pleasing others and being swayed. Okay. Well, with that, we're going to open it up for questions for the next 10 minutes or so. We have microphones. Yeah? Okay. So, if you could raise your hand, say your name, and then speak clearly into the microphone. People are shy. Mandy. Oh, wait. So there's a gentleman over there, and we'll also queue up Mandy. So, yeah? Can we go over there first? Yes? Hi. I'm Brendan. I really appreciated the comments. I wanted to ask you a bit about your point about trying to find contrarian business ideas. I was wondering if you could give some advice as to how to do that, especially when immersed in a place like Stanford. Okay. So it depends on what you're optimizing for. If you are trying to build the biggest possible business, you can almost work backwards, but also think first principles of what are big markets. Insurance is a really big market. Healthcare services is a really big market. Look at really big markets, and then try and understand what do you think you're going to be passionate about? What do you think you're going to enjoy doing? Do you think you're going to enjoy working in insurance? Do you like working or thinking about health and doctors? What is something that you think you're going to be excited about? I was really excited about stocks, and I thought I was going to be really interested in building a financial type business. So it kind of led me down that path to a certain extent. So then once you figure out a market that you think is interesting, and a thing that you think you're going to enjoy doing, because you've got to remember if you're going to be successful on this, you're going to be doing this for a decade or two or longer, you have to really like what you're doing, you have to enjoy talking to the customers you're working with, you have to enjoy interfacing with the people in the industry. So if you don't like those people, you're not going to enjoy building the business. And then you want to understand where are all the different problems. So the best way to identify problems is to do one of three things. Either you have come up with a thesis, and you can probably ask chatGPT what are the big problems. You can talk to people in the industry, and you can start to talk to traverse the industry, talk to a lot of people. Just understand what do they do. But then the third and the best thing is after talking to the people in the industry, you should just watch them. I sat in financial advisors offices all throughout the-- I still do this. I will go sit in a financial advisors office next week and just try and watch them, use our product, watch them do their daily lives, and you will find pretty quick insights, things that they're struggling with. And when you watch people, you will uncover insights that they do not see that could be potential businesses, that could be potential problems that you could solve. So it's just pretty simple. The back. So as the microphone is making its way down, you're a natural need finder. You really, really like being out in the field watching people use your product and watching people struggle with their day to day and understanding their needs. You have to. It's like a requirement of the job. It was another thing. When I stopped doing that for some period of time, in 2021 and 2022, the business was less successful. And when I started doing that, the business was better. As a CEO, if you look at any of the best enterprise CEOs, Satya Nadella, who runs a three trillion dollar company in Microsoft, spends a significant amount of his time doing enterprise sales. And by doing enterprise sales, he learns a lot of things and has a lot of interesting business breakthroughs. So your job, even the CEO's of the biggest companies in the world, talk to their customers. So you should do the same thing. Here, here. All right. Ready for the question. Thank you for being here. My name is Hatice. My question is around pivoting. How do you interpret the signal? So it's not too early for you to leave an industry and not too late. You don't have the time. So it depends. So sometimes you're too early. So I feel like Vise was a little too early. Just now, in the last two years, the market really identified, really come to terms with the need and is now realizing in the growth. So sometimes things have a delayed impact. So you have to make a determination of how high conviction are you, but this is what the future looks like. If you have a vision for the future and the way your business fits in is squarely fits with your vision for the future, then you should just stick at it and go through it and convince people along the way. That's what it takes to build a new category, build a category defining business. If that's not the case and you don't have high conviction on customers are using my product. They don't really seem to care. You should spend time with them and understand why are they not using the product. Is it really a problem? Is it really a need? And then there's some kind of micro pivot. So an example for us was our original thesis, as I mentioned earlier, was advisors were breaking away from big institutions and they were going independent. We were a little too late on that thesis. That was true, but it really happened in the early 2010s, like post financial crisis. The trend that actually drove a lot of the company's growth was the idea of the enterprise wealth manager, the RI aggregator, because advisors had started to age and they looked to sell their businesses and private equity roll-ups had spawned off and said, "We need to buy and integrate firms." So we realized all of the growth actually is going to come from building an enterprise product that services these enterprise RIA firms that are buying up all the little guys. And that was kind of a strategic pivot to some degree because we saw the market tail wins. So with some combination behind, what is the market doing and understanding? What are the tail wins behind the market? What does the market picture, market backdrop look like with what does your customer think? What is your customer doing? How is your customer utilizing your product today? Wonderful. Okay. Wow. Okay. Now the floodgates have been opened. Okay. Let's do the back since you're there and then we'll do all the way back at the front. My name is Hilal. If you were on the other side of the VC partner, what would you do differently to actually add value as opposed to distract in your case? So most VCs are stupid and useless. Even the VCs at the best funds in the world, like I've sat down, I've spent time with all of them. The exception is Peter Thiel is very smart. Like Peter Thiel, once we had a conversation and things were not going very well and I was telling him about how great our product was and then he says, "Samir, you were talking about product, all I hear is distribution." He's like anytime someone's talking about their product, it means they don't have distribution. And that has sat with me to this day and every single day I think about this is that like your job is functionally to get distribution and I was doing this product and it was kind of distracting me from distribution and like we kind of turned the company pretty quickly and all the pieces of advice I had gotten from him were pretty good. Outside of him and a few pieces from Michael Moritz from Sequoia, for the most part it's pretty bad advice. That being said, where a VC can be really helpful is like a couple of things if you know how to leverage them well. The first thing is like customer introductions. So if you're selling other technology companies, they have a big network of technology companies, you can sell into those technology companies and they can introduce you to a lot of people and they can also help introduce you to other investors. So like there's a benefit to not bringing on a multi-stage fund in your seed from a signaling standpoint and finding an investor. So Ben Ling was an early investor of ours, he had been a partner at Coastlaw and spun out and started his own seed fund. He had introduced us to a lot of people in Silicon Valley and it helped us build our network in Silicon Valley and create resources where it can. So leveraging it for customer introductions, other investor introductions, potential hires, like my framework on recruiting has always been instead of finding people and letting them apply to your job ads or letting them find you or going to a recruiter to find them, you want to find the best people in the world and the way you find the best people in the world is you ask the smartest people you know and people that you think have high talent bars, who are the smartest people they know and building a talent network. So part of the idea was how do you bring on a bunch of VCs that had invested in great companies, they had worked at great companies, they could be angel investors, they don't have to be VCs and they had worked with all these great people and then you go through their LinkedIn's, you ask them who are all the smartest people you know, who are the best engineers you know and then reach out to them and they're going to know people and you're going to build this talent network and eventually find a bunch of really great amazing smart people. So leveraging them from a talent perspective. But this doesn't have to be the VC that leads your financing around and has a big stake in the company. This could be a bunch of different angels. We've actually gotten more value from a ton of different angels that had built kind of adjacent companies that had been helpful with this than just taking on like a multi-stage VC fund. So not completely useless, but use them wisely. Yeah. Okay. All right. Just wanted to rephrase for the VCs in the room. We had two more. Sorry if I offended you VC. It's okay. We're speaking under a kind of silence here sort of, I guess. No, I'm totally okay with this being broadcast. This is the honest. So a bit of a personal question here. Do you sometimes contemplate whether you miss something in your adolescence due to your business-drivenness in your early days? So there's this kind of common narrative in Silicon Valley that when you start a company, your job, like you have to just hustle and you have to grind and you have to sit in a room with your laptop and work and that's like all you do is look at your laptop and then like when your metrics go up, you go talk to VCs and raise more money. I think that's completely false and your job is to like live a good life and be happy and have a lot of fun. So I think when I was young, I had like an option. I could like have fun, build a company and get good grades in school. I think my opportunity, my objective was let me have fun and work on my company. I don't think you can do all three. Runic had decided I'm going to get good grades in school and work on my company. So I'd still had plenty of fun. I had done like every single fun thing you can think of as a kid and then I had like had a ton of fun once we raised money and done every possible fun rich person thing you can think of and it was great and I would highly recommend you do it. That being said, like your job, because you want to build this company for a long period of time, you have to be happy in the process. So if you don't optimize for like being happy in the process, you're going to resent working on your business and you're going to quit. So the answer is I had a lot of fun. I don't regret anything and life was great. I sure hope Runic is having fun because we don't want him to burn out. Yeah. I think he just doesn't. He's the kind of personality where I don't think he he loves like I think he his version of fun is like solving interesting math problems and you know, things like that. So good. Good. That goes in tandem with building the business. Yeah. Let's take one more. One more question down here. Yeah. So I guess just my question was when you were running started and even up to, you know, a couple of years ago, you guys had a lot of critics, a lot of people saying we're young that you guys blew $50 million in VC funds. The business wasn't going very well. And then you had this moment that you kind of talked about just briefly where you reset the whole company, you know, you fired like a lot, almost the majority of the company. I kind of want to know like, what was it like from a leadership position having to reset your whole company and having to talk to people and still get their trust in your company after all that. So trust kind of arrives on footstep and leaves on horseback is like a common kind of phrase I've heard a few times, which is it's hard to earn trust. It's hard to get trust in the beginning and trust can disappear really, really quickly. So I think that part of the lesson was like being honest and transparent about the mistakes we were making. So I wrote this post called Refounding Vise. I posted it a year after we actually did the reset and part of the reason why I did it was because a lot of other founders had made the same, most other founders made the same mistakes, but I asked them, why don't you kind of lay off these people or like, why don't you reset? Why don't you admit you made mistakes as a founder and like reset because it's the right thing for your business and you will have more cash in as a result and have more runway. And they said, look, I'm too scared. Like I think that like everyone's going to hate me and I'm going to get all these critics. I'm going to have all this bad press and all these horrible things are going to happen. And the reason why I wrote that post was because I did it and it sucked for a few months and we had plenty of bad press and we had all of these critics and we had all of these people that threatened to sue us and do all these horrible things, but like it went away. And then like things were great and like you have to go through pain. You have to go through suffering to some degree. It's like what, it's just the reality of any kind of entrepreneurial journey. You're going to go through ups and downs. You're going to make a ton of mistakes, but you have to own it and like realize that like at the end of the day, even if you didn't directly make the mistake, you are responsible. You have to own it. You have to take extreme amounts of ownership on it and just understand that it's part of the journey and your job is to keep going through. And as you go through the journey, as you go through and suffer through it and kind of continue to push forward, you will inevitably build trust with the people you work with. And they'll see that you are kind of slaving away and trying to make the thing work and it will inspire people to kind of come along on the journey. And that's how you kind of build trust over long periods of time. So now I feel like we have a really strong team and everyone really trusts me because they see the journey we went through. They've seen us stick it through. They've seen us go through the learnings, be honest about the learnings, bring them on the journey together with them and it kind of, you know, help work out. I can't wait to see where you end up 10 years from now. I can't wait to see where VISA is 10 years from now. This is such an incredible story. We have to bring it to an end. But I hope you are all inspired by Samir and Vice. Let's give him a huge round of applause. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. [BLANK_AUDIO]