PoolTogether Community Podcast #37 with Farooq and Charles from Rain

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit.

You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast, and this is your boy Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka— Listen, if you're ever on Long Island in Babylon and you're at this place called Gemelli's, you gotta get— it's, it's kind of a But you gotta get the Guido sub. And I'm here with Rain Cards co-founders. I got Charles here and I've got Farouk here. Thanks for being on the pod, on the Pull Together pod.

Thank you for having us. We're excited. Yeah, we're excited to see you in the community.

Well, great. Yeah, it's warm and fuzzy in here already. And we got 3 awesome community members. We got Mom, we got Smart Investor, we got Live UC. People are going to keep coming in. We're excited about this. But listen, I, I'm pumped about Rain Cards because for some reason, as the stars have aligned, everything that I need in crypto, I'm interviewing people on the podcast about. So I interviewed Opulus about setting up my S corp LLC as a crypto contractor, and now I'm interviewing you two about my business card needs. So if we could just start, and I would love to hear your origin stories Both of your origin stories into crypto and then how Rain Cards came about, if you could.

For sure. Yeah. Mike, you could have just signed up on our waitlist and emailed us to get on the product. You didn't have to invite us on the podcast.

You know, I already did that, baby, but I wanted to speed it up. So I'm like, let's go, let's get it on the pod.

Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah. I mean, look, I've been crypto curious for a long time, you know, ever since the Bitcoin whitepaper. I had a buddy who was very degenerate and started mining Bitcoin back in the day when you could still do it on like GPUs. And he called me one day, he is like, dude, we can make a couple hundred dollars a month just mining this like electronic money. And at the time I was like, oh, you know, this sounds like a, I mean, a couple hundred dollars a month could be really useful. And so I started mining early on and then Made the foolish mistake of selling at the end of the week every week. And that got me a little bit disenchanted with crypto for a while after the Mt. Gox rug. And then I went away and then I came back a couple years ago when, you know, when Ethereum and all this stuff around smart contracts started taking off. I had to learn more about that and I've been just a casual observer of the ecosystem since then. And then got more involved in earnest sort of last year on the, during the NFT boom. And that was around the same time that Charles and I were thinking about working together. And I'll let Charles tell you his story.

Well, gimme dates. Gimme dates. Like what, whereabouts, whenabouts last year? Because really 6 months is a decade, right? So which decade of last year were you, did you meet?

Yeah, so Charles and I, we met On Slack about, well, what was it? January last year? And then—

It was, yeah, like February, February, March of last year.

Yeah. And then we started trading NFTs around March or April of last year. Uh, I got into my first, uh, Ponzu at that time.

Nice. Nice. And I feel like I can't tell if you have Slack open right now and I can hear your messages or if it's Discord. Um, but, but, uh, Slack, I don't even know what that is. I'm so Discorded now. I've, I'm, I've taken the Discord pill.

Yeah, we, we were, uh, deep in Discord for a while and then we realized that, um, it's hard to get like the engineering side of things working within the Discord thing, like, you know, tickets and things like that. So we, you know, I hate to admit it, but we did move over to Slack recently.

There's a lot less, uh, Scam bots, spam bots in Slack, you know, so it's probably just the grass is always greener. Maybe I should try it. Oh yeah. Okay. Who's next? Yeah. Sorry, Charles. You both have, you both have your names that aren't your names. So, but I got it. Charles, what's up with you? Tell me your story. Yeah, I first got exposed to crypto probably 2013, taking biology, startup engineering. Or Sarah Kloss, where he started just, he was just really excited about it and I got interested in it back then. And then same as Farouk, when I learned about Ethereum and smart contracts, I was super pumped, started mining Ethereum, got really disillusioned by all of the ICO scams that were out there. So kind of took a step back. But around last year when Farouk and I started working together, got excited about just the application level layer of crypto again. 'Cause I felt the infrastructure had gotten to a point where you can actually build interesting things and exciting applications. And the way that, that Rain started is Farouk and I were actually working on something different on the side called Sign and Wire, which was a fundraising tool for founders, make it really easy for you to fundraise, generate all your legal documents, move money. But when we started testing that out with our friends who were fundraising, they were really frustrated by the traditional financial system.

And how slow the rails were. We were built on top of ACH and it would take from 5 to 10 days for them to actually get the money because there was like multiple hops involved. And Farouk and I were trying to figure out, you know, there must be something faster in 2021 that is easy to use. And at the same time, we were getting really into NFTs and DeFi and Web3 and learned about startups that were starting to fundraise completely in crypto. Yeah, there was, you know, no tooling out there to make that easier. So we added support for fundraising in USDC, both on Solana and Ethereum to Sign& Wire. And through that and talking to more founders that have fundraised in crypto or were trying to fundraise in crypto, we learned about another problem they had, which was once you do fundraise in crypto or you have a sizable crypto treasury, you run into the problem of actually trying to spend that. Because even if you're a Web3 team, you still have a lot of the expenses of a regular team and you have to pay for laptops, you have to pay for cloud computing, for SaaS tools, for travel. And a lot of those vendors, they're not going to take Ethereum or USDC. They want fiat, they want US dollars. And there's only probably a handful of banks in the US that are friendly to crypto teams. And it could take you months to open up an account with them if they do let you do it. And then even open an account at like Coinbase Institutional will take you a few months. So a lot of teams we talked to were just using their personal cards for all of these expenses, which we felt was really broken for, you know, teams building out the future of finance to be doing in the 2020s. And that was November when we kind of had that realization that something like Rain needed to exist.

I love that. I love that. But I love how scrappy crypto is, right? You make it work, you put it together, you know, hopefully you're not cutting corners. But so Rain, Has these, I mean, your primary pro— your primary product is a business card. It's a way to hook up. I, I did the whole signup form and the waitlist thing, and it asked me if I, if my main treasury was on a Gnosis chain or if I'm using, you know, it just kind of like had me self-select. There are options in there for a personal card, business, or both. And, uh, for Apple Pay or, you know, you want a physical card or whatever. So. That, that's the main product of Rain, right? Is the, is the, is the ability that the, the business card.

Yeah, that's, that's correct. So we're starting off with, you know, solving that problem first, and then our longer-term goal, right, is to enable you from your decentralized or self-custody funds to interact with the financial system without requiring a bank account or an exchange. That's our longer-term vision. Like we think that It's important to take a lot of the interesting and amazing things that have been built by people in the Web3 ecosystem around finance and make it forwards compatible with the future of finance, right? We're less focused on bridging back to banking and things like that. We think that that's sort of diluting a lot of the advantages of crypto and Web3. So we want to take the self-custody model into engaging with the future. Like kind of how when you got a mobile phone, you could call people that didn't have a mobile phone, but you could do it on the go. We think that that's the financial equivalent. I mean, that's the Web3 equivalent of, you know, DeFi and the future of finance.

So how does this work without a bank? Or you're tolerating a bank right now before you can move to Bankless net.

Yes. I mean, we are tolerating banks right now, but we are never creating a bank account. So like when you get a bank, when you get a card from Rain, it's not tied to a bank account. It's not a debit card. Uh, you're not transferring money into fiat. You're not spending fiat, you're spending crypto and you're interacting with us directly in crypto. We're actually working on partnering with the credit card networks. Down the line to enable settlement in crypto as well. So a lot of the things that we're doing is really about moving the industry forward instead of wrapping a bank account and a, you know, OTC desk in the middle and having you effectively swap every time you want to spend money, because we think that that's just a, I mean, not an ideal model, right? We think that the better way to do it is how we're doing it, which is enabling direct spending directly from the crypto rails. into wherever the money needs to go and wherever margin needs to take it. And allowing you 100% coverage to anybody that takes a credit card today without having to have the uncomfortable conversation of, hey, you know, can I send you my USDT from, you know, Cosmos?

So then how does it, like, how does it work though? I mean, the, the Gnosis Safe would need to transfer money into a, an account. Would send it to Rain? Has, does each person have a specific wallet that they would send to? Could you just walk me through what, what, you know, topping up the card and, and buying a Beamer would be like?

For sure. Yeah. So essentially it works like a DeFi protocol. So just like Aave and Compound, you go stake collateral, you get access to a credit line. You can, you know, on Compound or Aave, you can withdraw USDC against that collateral in a lump sum, and then you send that to an exchange, whatever, go to a bank account. With Rain, you essentially do the same process at the beginning, but we give you a credit line on a credit card. So the money that you've staked on-chain is now available for you to spend against. And then at the end of the month, you send us, you know, you pay the bill with crypto and you go on to the next month. So that's how it works today.

So that sounds pretty bankless, right? I mean, it's like you have a line of credit, your Visa is providing that line of credit, and then it's crypto accounts. So bye-bye banks, right?

Absolutely. Like it's, it's, it's as bye-bye bank as you can get today.

Bye-bye. Okay, cool. That's really, that sounds really nice. That sounds really nice. But then I had a conversation with Stader Labs. We just released it yesterday, but it was last week. And we had that, we talked about this concept of idle money and you were talking about electronic money. Like, I just, that's funny. I should say that I deal in electronic money. It sounds very antiquated or something, but there's this concept of having loose money or idle money that's just around, right? So for gas fees or treasuries or stables or whatnot. And that's, you know, especially in DeFi, that's always the question is where's the yield? What can we do with this yield? Are there product creep temptations yet for Rain to add yield to anything, or is it so new of a product that you haven't had like the creep yet?

We've had,

yeah,

we've had a lot of customers ask us about the various different things that they can do with idle cash sitting around or idle tokens sitting around. And we are exploring options for that, right? I mean, one of the things that we've definitely learned is that This is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We have teams that have a very different security posture and risk posture than other teams, and we don't want to be in a position of like prescribing a solution where we're saying, hey, we rehypothecate all of your money and we deposit it in some DeFi or CeFi or CeDeFi protocol. We want to make sure that our, our cardholders and the teams that are using our product have the ability to impact, like to affect their own security strategy and their security posture. And make sure that they're comfortable with whatever's happening under the hood. We're a financial tool, and ultimately you can use tools to be degenerate. You can also use tools from a very risk, you know, conscious perspective. And so we have to be very, you know, careful about building something that can be used by all sorts of different people in this space, right? So part of that conversation is really around how do we support some sort of yield mechanism How do we enable that without, you know, creating the contagion of multi, multi-calls around multiple smart contracts where if there's an exploit at some receiving protocol or something like that, how do our users feel about that? How do we protect ourselves and our other users that didn't want any of their funds rehypothecated, right? So those are all the considerations around how we're designing everything. And yes, there's always temptations for scope creep around this kind of stuff, but we're trying to be very cautious about that and be very deliberate with having open conversations with our users and making sure that we understand and take their concerns into consideration.

Charles, I saw you unmute there for a second. Were you going to say something?

No, yeah, just to add on to what Farouk was saying, like we really believe that We want to give our users the choice of how their funds are invested or not invested and be able to choose the amount of risk they want to take. We don't want to make that decision for them. We just, our focus is building the best spending path for crypto-native teams.

Is this, is the product out yet? I couldn't tell from the site. I know I could get on the early access, but so early access means yes, right?

Yeah, we have teams already using it, spending money. All around. I think we've had transactions basically on every continent at this point. So we're, we're slowly on-ramping teams, um, off the waitlist.

Gotcha. Okay. And what does that, what does that process look like? Like, like signing up and, and being able to onboard a team?

Pretty smooth. We, you can go from us giving you an invite code to spending money in probably 5 minutes. Um, we ask some basic questions, like we do have to do KYB, so we ask for your legal entity for your EIN or an address. You load funds, you lock funds into Rain, you create a card, and then you can go and spend it. We allow you to create physical cards, virtual cards, set spending limits on them. It's very, you know, frictionless and smooth to get set up.

And how do you deal with credit lines? Is it based on the amount that you put within Rain, like the, your balance there?

Yeah, so we're, we're exploring a couple of different options for that right now. I mean, Today it's really, it works just like a DeFi protocol. So you have the flexibility to set whatever credit line you want for your own self utilizing your collateral balances. And then we give you access to that money instantly, right? So it really is up to you. The alternatives here are really creating like, you know, sharing private keys or creating durable authorizations and things like that. We are exploring some options there, but for the most part, the way that we do it now is really, I mean, has been designed by our customer base really. Like this is the, their preferred solution and that's what we've built.

Who's your, who's your competitor right now? Who do you think that, that, that you're, who, who is currently doing what you're doing, but not obviously not in the crypto space. I haven't seen, I mean, there might be crypto companies, protocols or whatever that are, that are doing this, but I would think like the main competitor would be like what, Amex Platinum or something? Like what, who do you, who are you going after? Who can we, who can we harass on Twitter?

Yeah, I think right now, I mean, our competitors would be typically the traditional corporate charge cards, right? There's companies like Brex or Ramp or Jeeves and Tribal, et cetera. There's people that are offering services to startups, right? And there's a lot of folks these days that are making a splash about supporting Web3 or wanting to support Web3 teams. And, you know, in many cases there's teams that have bank accounts and centralized exchange accounts that are using those tools. We think that there's enough room in the market for solutions like that that are more Web 2.5. And we think that there's more room in the market for solutions like ours, which are more natively Web3 and Web 3.5, as we like to call ourselves.

I love that, Web 3.5. And I know from PoolTogether being a prize savings account, Being the top savings account in crypto, it's very difficult to try to integrate with Web2 banks like neobanks. I'm not a dev, so I don't really know the tech side of that. I just know that it's not ideal, but being a savings account where you can keep your stables and you get this yield, you get these prizes daily. And the cool part is you can unlock that and give your friends your prizes at no loss, or you can use it for marketing campaigns, or you can use it to add utility to your NFT with that DeFi PoolTogether power by putting your NFT treasury into PoolTogether. It's, I want to see that, but I know like technically it's very difficult, especially in the banking world or in the debanking world to be that web. I love that, that Web 3.5, like you just have to, you're basically, your customer is somebody who's already pilled. They're already all the way in. And for PoolTogether, it's just, I'm just thinking on the business development, like our client, we're going after like new users and then you're going after like Web 3.5 and how do you kind of find your target market? So how has it been for you finding that target market? It sounds like that Web 3.5 is who you're going after. It's just like the mavens of crypto, the OG crypto types. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we're, we want to focus on servicing the people that have been in the space longest that have built this space, right, for all of us. And those are the people that have had the problem for the longest time as well. So it's, we've been fortunate in the sense that we've gotten plugged into, you know, amazing members of the PoolTogether community and other communities within crypto that have, you know, really driven a lot of inbound to us. We don't have like a outbound sales function really today. All of our demand has been completely organic. I mean, I know Leighton from PoolTogether has sent a bunch of people over to us that currently use the product today. And then each individual customer, a new cardholder that signs up is another ambassador for the product because again, like we are the fastest and cheapest way to go from on-chain to spending anywhere, right? We are the most direct. Option. And like you mentioned earlier, right? Like for a lot of teams that have tokens or have token projects or have like international organizations, corporate structures, et cetera, it's very difficult for them to access any traditional financial tooling. And so because we're not building traditional financial tooling, we are able to service customers that otherwise would be very difficult to support, right? And because of that, we've been able to sort of chip out a place within this community where we have some of the, you know, some of the most amazing teams and folks that I've looked up to ever since I've been involved in crypto utilizing our product. And we get to see them, you know, expanding their usage on a daily or weekly basis and then even better referring other members of the community to us that may not have heard of us already.

So that target market is going to be projects, protocols, larger teams, Gnosis Safe people, not necessarily because I think the world revolves around me, freelancers and contractors and, you know, basically the Web3 workforce. It's going to be the corporate types. Yeah.

It's actually a mix. So we've seen a number of like DAO teams and freelancers, Sign up for the product. You know, it depends on the DAOs. Like we have some folks that do, they're like a developer collective that do bounties for multiple protocols. We have a handful of folks that do freelance work for multiple protocols. We have people that work singularly within a protocol as like their, you know, design team or UI/UX experience team, or their like marketing team, et cetera. And we are able to service all of them, right? So we, we don't really draw a line in the sand here. We're ultimately going to be building various levels of products and various tiers of products based on the different usability and experience that you have, right? So obviously a freelancer, the usage and what the tools that you might need from a freelance perspective are going to differ from what a full-fledged decentralized governance DAO with a smart contract is going to need. In terms of feature sets, but also in terms of accounting and reconciliation work, et cetera. And so we, we want to have people that have different use cases and that behave differently so that we have an idea of what the future of product looks like, right, in this space.

Okay. And then right before, I'm going to pitch something to you, but before I pitch, I want to be a little bit clearer on this. So you do cold stables, so you fold a balance and, and it's just like Aave, right? I'm going to, I'm going to deposit and it's good, probably stable, right? It's USDC or DAI or something pegged to the US dollar. I'm going to deposit a, a big, you know, an amount and I can, I can, I have credit up to half of that. Is that how it works right now?

No. So if you are to utilize like USDC as collateral, you have access to 100% of it.

Oh, okay, great. Got it. Got it. Okay. But that's the credit line. That's the credit line allotted to me or the company or the protocol.

Exactly. And then each individual card, you can actually change it and you can have spending limits monthly or whatever.

And then payments, how does, how, how does paying the balance work? Is that a monthly thing or you, you just said that you can do, you could pick whatever frequency you want.

Yeah. So right now it's, it's going to be a monthly thing. Um, and then You know, in the future we are exploring alternatives, but we, we haven't settled on those yet. But yeah, right now you would just, you know, do a transaction at the end of the month to pay the bill.

Okay, here we go. Here's the pitch. Okay, so PoolTogether has PTA USDC. So when you deposit stables in PoolTogether, you get back a PTA USDC, so a ticket, and it's 1-to-1 US dollar USDC. And so like, what if I could use Rain And I could have my credit limit in PTA USDC. It's in your custody, but then you delegate all the prizes back to me. And based on what I spend monthly, then you, you get that as USDC, but I'm able to stay within the PoolTogether realm. So PoolTogether is my, is my bonus, my yield, my whatever, whatever you want to call it, my prizes. I still get my prizes.

Yeah. This is, Probably something that we'll have to think through as we think about the yield and the other pieces of that integration. I mean, longer term, right? We want to enable as many of these use cases as possible because we think that, you know, there's long-term advantage having multiple teams and, you know, communities being supportive of our product and our services, and then also creating that feedback loop within the Web3 ecosystem. So right now it's, we're, We're really focusing on getting the feature sets right. And then, yeah, down the line, I don't see why we can't explore this as an option.

Charles, I got you excited, right? Come on, come on. I got you a little pumped.

I'm excited. Yeah, it's definitely stuff we want to enable in the future. You know, if you have collateral locked in Rayn, we want to support as many tokens as possible. We want you to be able to earn yield from your favorite places, whether that's PoolTogether or something somewhere else. So definitely something that we're excited about for the future and we're You know, we have stuff up our sleeves.

I love that. I love that. How's hiring going? I've been seeing a lot of posts on the Twitters about we need devs, but really the big need I'm seeing right now, at least in my Twitter feed, is our designers in the space. And so I looked at you guys, I think you're hiring devs, got some other positions available right now, but how has hiring been going as you're trying to scale?

Yeah, hiring has been surprisingly good. We, like, one of the reasons we wanted to build a product like Rain is because building a credit card company is fun and it's a real-world use case for a problem that people have individually and they also have as contributors to protocols and DAOs. And so when we chat to people, they get hooked onto us and our solution because, you know, most of the folks on our team were people that are actively involved individually within the Web3 ecosystem, right? So this is a problem that they're like, oh, you know, I sold a picture of a toad and I wanted to buy sneakers and I couldn't do it because by the time the money got in my bank account, they were sold out, right? And so like, these are actual use cases that our customer, like our own team members and potential team members have had. And so that's where we've been able to get a lot of conviction from them. And be able to recruit them to join our team to solve the problem for the ecosystem. So overall, the, we've been very fortunate with hiring. We are continuing to hire. So if there's anybody within the ecosystem that is interested in joining a team that is building, you know, one of the most, you know, most important pieces of Web3 infrastructure and solving a very top-of-mind problem for some of the most well-known people and well-known protocols and teams within the space, please reach out to us. You know, we are always down to chat and we're always open to chatting to amazing people that are exploring this.

What are, what are some tips for interviewing with you on, for Rain? Like what, how, how, what's, how do we wow you if we're interviewing? Do we need to give us like some, are there deep like references we need to talk about like Grateful Dead or something, or? Like a John Turturro film. What are some tips to interview with Rain?

Yeah, I mean, for me it's really about whether he passed the vibe check, but for a mega CPM, I think he's got a lot more things that he likes to see.

I mean, we, you'll be surprised, like the, we like people who are excited about what we're building, who know what we're building, who have, you know, contributed to DAOs or are actively participating in DAOs. So probably anyone who's on this call right now would be a great, a great candidate for us.

Very cool. Very cool. I remember I was at Permissionless, uh, a couple months ago, a couple decades ago, and, uh, and I saw a Visa booth and I was like, Visa, what is Visa doing here? And then, and then I heard about like institutions and everything, and I was just like, oh man, like there were people in suits. And I'm like, where, you know, I, I, I was, I thought I was going to see some finance bro vests, you know, going around. So how do you make, how do you, and maybe, maybe I'm, this is just me projecting, but how does, how can we make these, the credit card, the Web 3.5 credit card cool or like not the man and not banking? And I guess Visa's kind of doing well to distance themselves from banking, at least in the crypto space. I don't know what I'm talking about, but. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, I get what you're talking about. I think that, look, we're building this with Web3 at the very core, right? We are not trying to masquerade as a crypto company. We are, there's no, there's no banker vests in our offices. I don't think any of our team even owns one. I'm a former banker. I don't even own one, right? Like, only ironically. Yeah. We, we, we, we, Our whole like uniform, and if you've seen like our, you know, press, our uniform is, right? Like we are saying we're building the, you know, the anti-bank, the, the essential, the future of the space, right? And part of this is really leading from the very DNA of what we're building. And that's really what gets us excited about it, right? We're not trying to bridge back. I mean, I don't know how many times I have to say this, like we're not bridging back to anything. We're bridging forward.

But maybe, maybe like you, you know, in, uh, jiu-jitsu, I mean, I don't know anything about jiu-jitsu, but I'm told that if somebody, you know, in wrestling, if somebody goes, wants to go one way, you let them go that way, but you throw your weight. So maybe the move is you actually make the Finance Bro vests, the Reign ones, you know, but like with some like ironic sort of thing. Maybe I want to do that. I just want to lean into it and just walk around. I know my mom tells everyone I'm in finance because she doesn't want to say crypto.

Yeah. Right now it's definitely like, Yeah, we, we got 'em, Card. But sorry, go ahead.

We're working on like banker bag swag. Uh, so like the traditional finance bros with their banker bags, but a, a rain version of it. That should be fun.

I love that. Yeah, I posted an American Psycho, uh, GIF in the, in the chat. Just don't make it serial killer-y. Raincoats could go that direction, but as, but you know, I'm sure there's some really good ones if you did like the classic yellow. But that's not in your brand palette. You gotta, it's gotta be pink. It's gotta be, or fuchsia, whatever.

You can always have alternative colors, you know, like the, like a soccer team.

Right. You get the home and the away. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. Well, I always like to ask, as the PoolTogether community loves to partner with people, loves to, you know, get the word out, loves to onboard new noobs to crypto, the crypto curious. How can we help Rain? Like, what's, what's the main need of the company right now? Oh, those look good. Look at those, those slickers. Also love that you're New York City based. Brooklyn represents. But, uh, what, how can the Pull Together community help, uh, get the word out about Rain? What's, what are some needs that you have right now?

Yeah, I think right now the main things, you know, if there's features and things like that that people want to see within crypto that their existing financial tooling is not giving them, We're always open to ideas and feature requests. So anybody that wants to ping us directly, we're happy to engage and learn and chat and all that fun stuff. So that's the order that, I mean, that's the main thing that we're looking for right now. And then as we expand over the next several months, anybody that's interested in joining a team, building the products that we're building and the vibes that we're Please reach out. And yeah, if you have, if you're contributing to any community and they're making you pay for things outta your pocket and then trying to reimburse you in native tokens, and then you gotta figure out how you gotta report it on your taxes, send 'em our way, right? Like we are solving a very real problem for individual contributors because we are eliminating your risk from a Tax reporting perspective, because you'll be able to spend directly from the protocol or your team without having to take that money into your Coinbase or FTX account and then have the risk of having to deal with how FTX is going to characterize the money in your account as income, right? So those are the things that we want people to be mindful of. And anytime that you're having to go out of pocket to finance the team that you're supporting, There's, you know, there is a better way. You don't have to do that.

Well, sign Hot Mike up for Rain. I'm on the waiting list, so I would love to do it. It's just little old me. I'm, you know, I'm contracted with PoolTogether and the Wasis, which is an NFT project, but I would love to try it out and do it. Listen, I have an Amex Platinum business, but those lines to the Centurion Lounge in the airport, they're really long. So, you know, for, I, you know, I have to press play.

Yeah. The more people that sign up, the, the more likely it is that we get a Rain Lounge, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. What would be the,

what would be the, what's the equivalent of a Centurion Lounge to you if Rain gave, uh, you know, perks?

Oh my gosh. Well, I mean, that, that would be one is like, I, I, I mean, Rain, you could partner with the lounges. There's so many different airport lounges. But I do think that, I think that's a big thing is like, if you're traveling, if you could do some sort of like airport presence, even if it was like in Heathrow And JFK, and I don't know, just a couple key— that would be so baller. Oh my gosh.

No Miami, Mike?

Where?

No Miami, the crypto capital of America.

That's— I don't— you know what's funny? At Permissionless, everybody was trashing Miami. But yeah, I mean, I grew up in South Florida. What if you did Palm Beach International, right?

Oh yeah. No, we are, we are, you know, we're looking at some options. We, like, like Charles said earlier, we have some things up our sleeve. And so—

Oh my gosh.

We're excited about some cool stuff coming down the line.

No, but no, if you have Miami, Miami's a great, Miami's a great town. LAX, you know, it'd be cool. Yeah, I, I wanna, where, where, how do I get in the spin?

You need Lisbon, you know?

How do I get in the Rain Slack? 'Cause you don't have a Discord, right?

Uh, we actually, we do have a Discord. We, we, we, we—

Oh, okay. Well, I'll get in there.

Yeah.

Cool.

It's, uh, it's dormant right now. Um, but we're gonna revive it.

Okay, perfect. Well, cool. Hey, um, do you have anything else that we, that you wanted to go over or things you wanted to address? Just like, I know, I, I'm just, we're rooting for you. So this is really exciting and I'm not, I'm not lying. I, I totally want a, a Rain card in my money clip. But yeah, anything else we need to talk about?

We have a bunch of, uh, freelancers using the card right now, so happy to onboard you and, and have you try it out.

Okay.

Yeah. And, and for anybody listening, if you wanna get expedited off the waitlist, please just put in there that you heard us, um, shooting the shit over here at the pool together. stage. So we know how you found us and that'll be, that's always helpful for us when we curate through the waitlist is people that are engaged and active and people that are coming in through the trusted network that we've already built in the space. That's

helpful. I put Jennifer in there as my referral. Jennifer, shout out for setting this up. But yes, please, listener, Sign up for Rain, sign up for the Rain card, put PoolTogether as who referred you, and you might get hooked up with a Rain slicker in JFK or something, whatever. I can see visions of the future. So good.

Yeah. And then, yeah, and if it makes sense for PoolTogether, the protocol itself, to get a card for the communities, let us know. We can certainly support that too.

Love that. Love that. Well, again, Farouk, Charles, thanks so much for joining us. This has been really great for you to give us, you know, 45 minutes of your time on a Wednesday. It's very valuable. I know you're in startup mode, so you're just hustling. So thanks for making us a stop on your hustle train. And thanks for listening to the Pull Together Podcast, everybody.

Thank you. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.