17 - How Meow Technologies Surpassed $1b in Assets on the Platform with Fewer Than 20 Employees with Brandon Arvanaghi

How do you only have 15 people on your team? That is a very surprising number to hear. Most tech companies are raising, they've got big teams, they've got a lot of people working on disparate projects. You've got 15 people with $2 billion of assets under management. Talk me through your ethos and the structure.

Yeah, it's a great question. We're approaching $2 billion, we're not quite there yet. You would think that everyone at a company serves a purpose, but I think one of the biggest alpha—

Oh, that was savage. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Nickonomics. We had an awesome episode today. If you've ever been curious about venture investing or about raising money from venture capital, then this episode is for you. I sat down with Brandon Arvanaghi. He's the founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is a business banking fintech, and we go through all things venture capital. It was a fascinating interview because my business background is in small and medium businesses. I've never raised venture money, but I've always been curious about about it, and Brandon was kind enough to walk us through. Take a listen to his pedigree. Forbes 30 Under 30. Why would I be jealous? Raised money from Tiger Global. On his cap table, Sahil Bloom, Austin Reef. Oh, and he's raised over $30 million and has almost $2 billion on their platform. It's pretty incredible. I think you're really, really going to enjoy this episode. If you like it, please like and subscribe, share with a friend, get the word out. This is the gentleman's agreement. I provide this for free. You like and subscribe to feed my ego. So with that, let's just hop into the show. Welcome back to Nickonomics. I am super excited. I have Brandon Arvanaghi here. He's the founder, CEO of Meow. I think anybody who's been on social media or Twitter has definitely seen your company, Brandon. I'm going to be honest though. I had no idea what your company did until Alex, the wedding venue guy, explained it to me. So If you could, just very briefly, what does your company do?

Yeah, Alex is great, and it's great to be here, by the way, Nick. Thanks so much for having me. What we do at Meow, we're a business banking fintech. So what does that mean? We're not a bank ourselves, but we basically found banks. We partner with banks that are willing to pay high interest rates on operating accounts for businesses. So we went to these banks and we were like, we can bring you folks maybe a billion deposits, but to do so, you need to give us a really good rate for any customer, any business who onboards to the Meow platform to get a business checking account through your bank. And they said, okay, let's see what you can do. So that's the story. So when you get a business checking account through the meow.com website with one of our partner banks, you can expect higher interest rate than the national average today.

How? I get it conceptually, right? Like we park money with you and you're able to give us a higher interest rate on operating capital that's parked with you, but How do you afford to give people a higher interest rate?

Yeah, so it's the bank giving the rate. That's the important thing. So we're just like a software skin. We're not the bank. We're not your counterparty. That's the nice thing. You get your own account number and routing number at the bank you choose at the platform. Now the question is how. That's the fundamental question. You're exactly right. So these banks are able to potentially pay a higher rate because they don't have to deal with things like customer support. They don't have to deal with things as much, right? They don't have to do the go-to-market for it. But we can help make the onboarding smoother, even though we're collecting the same information. So this is a new age. Banks are very good at risk historically and like having their bank charter. Fintechs, tech companies like us at Meow, we're good at distribution, we're good at marketing, we're good at adding a software skin on top of it. So it's this really beautiful hand-in-glove relationship that allows us to, to do that.

How does Meow compare to Mercury? So for example, I bank, I bank with Mercury, but from my understanding, Mercury's kind of got a similar setup where they've got banking relationships and essentially they're just the skin, like you said, the software skin that you're interfacing with those banks through. How are Meow and Mercury similar? Are they different? Like, how does that work?

We're very similar in that we're both— neither of us are banks and we both partner with banks. So it's a very similar setup in that way. We have a comparison table on our site. Mercury is a great company, by the way. They pioneered a lot of what we're seeing today, where fintech partners with a bank, they make a very smooth experience to onboard to that bank partner. So hats off to them. We're very similar in that regard. There are definitely differences between us and there's comparison tables to speak to that.

I guess what I don't understand is like, why wouldn't the banks just do this themselves? Why does it, why do you need a third-party software to overlay as a skin? Why wouldn't the banks just have developed the software?

Yeah. So banks run on cores and a lot of the software that they can use for their kind of front end is one size fits all. And they might get the same update as 1,000 other banks or 5,000 other banks or 3,000 other banks in a day. Whereas fintechs like ourselves, we are tech companies, we're technologists at heart, and we can build to the next wave quicker. If we see something out there, we can build something quickly, like as a skin around it on day one. Again, banks are really good at risk, right? That's their bread and butter. And that's what we do as tech folks is bring the other side to it. Now you think about a, a bank in Tennessee or a bank in, let's say, California or something like that. Today they're competing with Bank of America, JP Morgan. It's a global thing. When you got a bank account maybe 5, 6 years ago, 10 years ago, it might have been about where can I find the most ATM, ATMs around me, right? The branches around me. Now we're very national kind of com— competition. So for them, the smartest thing to do, in my opinion, is to partner with fintechs who can help them get that global reach to compete, to be able to compete, because there's a lot of banks in the US and I think that's going to consolidate over time.

Where did this idea come from? How did you come up with it?

I would just say we— this was not the initial idea. Directionally, it was we thought financial services were icky. We wanted to build a B2B suite. My co-founder's Midwest. I'm from Northern Virginia. So we, we wanted to eventually get to serving Main Street businesses.

What was the original idea?

We wanted to build a B2B suite. We were both at Gemini at the time. So we wanted to build a stablecoin-based B2B suite. And one thing led to another. We raised a Series A even for that, pivoted very aggressively, and then we made it easier for businesses to access T-bills through our broker-dealer partner. So that was our idle cash. We were a treasury management company.

Interesting. So you started as a Web3, or I, I, I shouldn't say you started as a Web3 company. Like your background was with Web3 cuz Gemini is a, or was a, are they, are they still around? Did they get acquired?

They're still around.

Yeah, they're still around. Are they the ones that were backed by the Winklevoss twins?

Correct.

Okay.

Yeah.

You started with Web3 experience. Was Meow originally a Web3 concept?

Yeah, definitely. Our very first idea, I think it was like we were looking at like, uh, DM or something like that. Remember the Facebook? Facebook had an idea of stablecoin. Yeah, it was a long, long time ago. And yeah, one thing led to another and we ended up becoming a treasury management company by making it easy for business to buy T-bills, uh, through our broker-dealer partner. We made a really intuitive UI. So what, what happened was we had 80 to 90% of businesses' balances and we were like, all right, how do we get the remaining 10%? Because people want to do everything in one place. And we thought just being a treasury management company is for losers because it's a nice stat. Yeah. Anyone who actually like powers the operating account in our opinion is the one that owns the customer relationship. You don't want to be the one that they like flirt with or they check in on once every month. You want to be the one that's giving you feedback every day. They're beating in the product. They're using every inch of it. And that's the operating account. So that's when we partnered with banks to do that.

So you were in treasury management with Gemini?

Not with Gemini, no, but that was like Meow's wedge. Effectively to—

but you were at Gemini and you're like, basically— well, I'm putting words in your mouth here— were you at Gemini thinking, we have all this cash, where are we going to park it? Like, it needs to be in treasury services. Or, you know, Gemini's already parking this cash, they could be doing this a better way. No, here's our idea.

No, I was a security engineer. I had no—

oh, okay.

Yeah, so I was an engineer, my co-founder was an engineer. We just would be ideating on things every day. We were just B2B founders at heart. We always wanted to start a company, and COVID came around, and that allowed no-name people like us to raise funding for the first time and, and hire.

Where were you living? Where were you living at the time?

So during COVID we did the Miami thing. We started the company there.

Is that where you were when you raised?

Yes, when we did our pre-seed and seed. Um, exactly.

Okay, walk me through that process, because this is fascinating for me. I've bought a lot of businesses and sold a lot of businesses. I've been mainly in the SMB space. I've had some experience with private equity just because when you grow a small and medium business, that's typically who you sell to is a private equity group that's rolling it up and then they take it upmarket and go public. But I don't have a lot of experience in the VC space and it's just fascinating to me. I've always been like, I don't ever want to raise cuz then I'm giving away autonomy and freedom, et cetera. But walk me through the decision to raise, like, why did you and your co-founder think, hey, let's raise, let's not bootstrap?

That's very fair all your assessments of it. And there's a huge trade-off. A lot of people think when they raise, it's game over. It's time to take more pics on Instagram. It's time to like flaunt and then their company's going to die in 2 years. Right. And you're not going to see a payout if you raise yourself, best case for a decade. Right. In my opinion. For us, we did want to build up. We wanted to build a product. We wanted to build something that could be a generational, like household name. And that was just like the phase of life that we were in. So to do so, we needed really good engineering. We needed our best friends from different walks of life to join. That's really where the decision came from was because I couldn't convince them to work for free, probably. So that, that led us to raise. And that was great that we had our closest friends join the company early and start to start the company there.

We're going to get back to the show in one minute, but I just wanted to tell you about today's sponsor, which is, uh, Me? Oh, it's me. I'm sponsoring the show. Yeah, because I'm doing this for free. Do me a favor, like and subscribe right there, right at the bottom. Move your— yep, it's right there.

Yep.

Awesome. Thank you. All right, so again, I'm fascinated by this. I know nothing about it. Yeah, in venture capital, what are the rounds? You've got angel, pre-seed, seed, A, B, C, or like, are angel and pre-seed the same? Like, what are the rounds? And just briefly explain what they are. Yeah.

So pre-seed and seed, they get like mixed together. You can call it whatever you want. First time you raise funding, you can call it either. You can get angel investors involved. Yeah.

So pre-seed and seed, first time you're raising money, like what are the typical sizes that you're, are you typically raising a million dollars? Is it like $100,000? I just have no idea. What are the ranges?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. It depends on the funding environment and how sexy you are to VCs. So in 2021, a pre-seed could have been like $5 million and then you could have gone Yeah. And you could have gone out to market 3 months later with that product and extended it or pre-seed extension or seed. But if you were in 2014 or like 2012, when only Mark Zuckerberg is like raising money, right? The pre-seed, the seed might be like $200K or something like that. You know, it depends on the environment. Yeah. But it's tended to get bigger over time.

And the pre-seed or the seed round, what does that money do? Are you a product-market fit in that round, or is it like, I've got an idea, I need money to build it?

It again depends on the environment. So in 2021, you could have crapped in a box and called it the next generation thing, and you could have probably raised— honestly, you still see that to some extent. You could raise $100 million.

You say AI, you say AI now, and it's like, oh, take my money.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And to be clear, there's a lot of use cases for AI, and there's a lot of companies that raise based on AI. If they put it at the front of their website, there's probably a reason for that, right? Like they're— so yeah, it depends. I would argue that back in the days of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, that was like the cream rises raises. There was really intense diligence from investors. You had really savage founders at the helm. Every dollar made sense. That's how companies probably should be built. But I'm— I can't be really one to talk because the only reason I was able to raise money was because of the 2021 environment in the first place.

So, well, well, you raised, I mean, that, yeah.

All right.

So you've got the seed, pre-seed, you're raising your first round and you're like, all right, I, I gotta, I have a product or an idea. I need money or funding to get to the next stage. Uh, what is a Series A raise? What does that, is that typically a company who's like, all right, we've got product market fit. We just need gas to add to the fire. Or what do they typically look like?

It, again, it depends, but. When you're in a, depending on the environment, Series A either means you have product market fit and it's time to scale, or if it's a healthy environment, VCs might tell you, like a healthy fundraising environment, VCs might tell you that you can still raise on narrative at that point, or a bet, or like, it's still in the conversation. Some VCs will tell you that, some VCs will not tell you that. But when you get to B, that's like the next round, that's when you are, you know, your valuation's super high, it's a growth round, et cetera. That's when it's, there's no more narrative. It's all about the numbers. And A is about the numbers too, just to be clear. But some of them, some VCs will tell you it's about narrative as well.

So what rounds have you raised? You've raised a seed.

We've raised only, and yeah, so seed and Series A is what we've raised.

Seed and Series A. When did you know you had—

3 million to date.

Oh, awesome. Did, wait, you say 3 or 30?

30, 3-0.

30 million. Okay, that's another question I have. When someone's, oh, they raised a $30 million Series A round, does that mean the valuation was $30 million or does that mean they got $30 million in cash towards a $100 million, whatever the valuation was?

The latter. So we raised $22 million Series A approximately. And yeah, and we had a different valuation on top of that. But yeah, it's what you just described.

What, when did you know you had product market fit and what did that feel like?

It's a very good question because we, I think we thought we had product market fit going into the Series A. It definitely seemed like it because our growth was really strong, etc. Like our growth was strong going into it, obviously, but that momentum was very important to getting the deal done. But then you like actually experience it, which is feeling like you're getting pulled violently in a direction. And that was post-SVB. That was a unique situation, right? But since then. Like we saw the inflows from SVB, saw a billion come to the platform in a matter of like maybe 4 weeks.

That's a billion? $500 million.

Yes.

Wow.

Yes. But post that, it's been pretty consistent being pulled in a direction as opposed to having to do a little pushing yourself. We still have to put our, put our foot on the pedal, so to speak, but yeah, there's a pulling dynamic of customers like asking for this and customers telling their friends, which we're blessed for. So that's. I would say it was post-Series A where we had real product market fit.

Give me some numbers. How big is your company now? I know you can't share revenue, but is there a metric that you like to use to show just, hey, we're, we've got this much of assets under management or headcount or I'm not sure, customers? Yeah.

So we're approximately 15 people and we're close. We're approaching $2 billion in assets on the platform across all of our entities and Do you have 15 employees? Yeah, approximately. Now, I'm quite proud of this. If you boil down the essence of Meow into the stupidest, simplest kind of sentence, there's nothing innovative that we're doing. There's nothing innovative that we're doing. We're not a, like, pie in the sky. We're not like some, like, new idea from the ground up. We are applying something very simple to a, to a gigantic industry. So financial services is a $16 trillion market. We think financial services are a commodity. So to hire a massive headcount and keep hiring and raise at a crazy valuation, like billion plus, and then hire 1,000 more people and offer fundamentally what we consider as a commodity is a losing strategy. And it's not in the best interest of the customers, in our opinion. So by keeping our cost structures very low, we believe that we can pass back better economics from our bank partners. And win on volume instead of on margin for what is fundamentally, in our opinion, a commodity.

Uh, it's like Amazon's approach to it, right? For the longest time it was volume, not margin. And then all of a sudden, the last 5 years or so has just been a massive upswing. What do you mean it's a commodity? Walk me through what that means to you.

Well, we feel like if you get a business checking account somewhere, you're not gonna— it's not this crazy complex software or some premium service in our opinion. Right? The relationship is valuable. We try to give a very good relationship to our customers as well, but you shouldn't be paying for that through the nose, in our opinion, by way of, for example, not getting interest from that account. That's a very good example. Yeah. And you mentioned Amazon. We really like Costco. So we're not affiliated with Costco. We can't make any definitive claims there, of course, but we really like their model. Costco, the CEO consistently says, we are a volume business, not a margin business. And doing Costco, if someone were to do Costco for financial services, that is an enormous opportunity in our opinion. And I don't think anyone has successfully or even tried that in my opinion. I have not seen a company really try that yet.

In your mind, what's the difference between saying Costco and Amazon? If I were to say, oh, you guys are the Amazon of the finance space, or you guys are the Costco of the finance space, like what, why Costco? No, why not Amazon?

I, I wouldn't. Yeah, I would. I think AWS is really the backbone of Amazon now. And that's it. That business prints money. They make a lot of money on that. So yeah, that's fair.

That's good.

But I think it's a great analogy though. I definitely agree.

So who's your ideal customer? Is it banks? Is it businesses? Is it retail? Who is your customer?

Our customers, businesses in the US. So we're a business banking fintech in the US. Historically, we've served the startup market. We're very grateful for that market. We really want to serve the meat and potatoes of America. Kind of the main street kind of real business as well. And we're growing aggressively in that market. Now we're, we're very excited about SMB Twitter, for example, uh, and folks there. And I think that's because of our backgrounds, just not necessarily being born into the, the ecosystem, so to speak.

Are you going to Capital Camp?

I was close. Uh, I was close at all. Okay.

No worries. How do you only have 15 people on your team? That is a very surprising number to hear. Most tech companies are raising, they've got big teams. They've got a lot of people working on disparate projects. You've got 15 people with $2 billion of assets under management. Talk me through your ethos and the structure.

Yeah, it's a great question. We're approaching $2 billion. We're not quite there yet. It's a great question. You would think that everyone at a company serves a purpose, but I think the biggest output—

Oh, that was savage.

The biggest alpha Bryce and I have— my co-founder Bryce and I have— is that we worked at companies our whole lives before starting Meow. So we were cogs in machines. So we actually understood how companies worked on the inside. Because if we wanted to get something done, for example, we'd see the different committees it would have to go through and the people slowing it down and the useless people from a product perspective, for example. So we knew that.

So, uh, yeah.

You don't actually need 1,000 people if you just keep it to the essential people and you don't hire. The problem with hiring is that it's not just the people you hire, but then they hire people beneath them to promote themselves internally, and then those people hire people beneath them, and then you have this runaway train where you have to raise money and you have to take it away from the customers. In our opinion, you have to take away the economics from the customers. You have to tax them in some way for your hiring mistakes, in my opinion. So that's the difference with us is we work with companies. If we stay super lean, we take advantage of being super second mover, we can do so and we can try to always pass back the best economics possible to the customer.

Well, I can tell you're passionate about it. That's awesome.

That's awesome. I'm very passionate.

Yeah, that's, no, it's fantastic.

Yeah.

How do you currently get customers? Like what does your customer funnel look like? Are you, yeah. I'll leave it open-ended.

Because we're a volume play and not a margin play, we don't make that much on any customer, right? That means that we, it's very difficult for us to be sales-led, like super sales-led. What we see a lot of fintechs do, for example, is pay no interest or nominally no, very little interest on the checking account from their partner bank. And they do all a huge sales-led motion because they could feasibly be clipping 4 to 5.5% on every customer that deposits into their partner bank's checking account. That allows them to have a sales team, for example. Yeah, like a big sales team where they can give enormous commissions to them. So we can't do that. That's hard for us. We have to stay super lean because we're giving the customer the majority of the economics from our partner banks. So at first it was the— not quite the cold start problem, but we didn't have any customers. So it was a lot of hand-to-hand combat. We had some of the angels we took money from, they had big Twitter audiences. So that was super helpful when they would tweet about us. That gave us a waitlist.

Yeah.

So I don't know if like Sahil Bloom or Paki McCormick or Austin Leaf, those folks.

So they, they, I didn't know that.

Yeah. That was the beginning. And our goal is really just to have as many customers as possible because when they, it has to be word of mouth driven and thank God it's gotten to that point where people will just organically tell their friends. And I think the name Meow helps with that because you don't really forget it.

Oh, because you don't forget it.

Yeah, I've had people forget my name a million times. They never have forgotten Meow. They're like, oh, what's my name again? How's Meow? So that's, uh, okay.

What made you pick it? Because it is a very unique name.

Yeah, so it's an S-curve name, and the analogy I give is, yeah, it's an S-curve name is like the kind of name that like there's atmosphere when you start, but then when you get to the upper atmosphere, it's a huge compounding advantage. It's like kind of skating to where the puck is going. So the analogy I give is Steve Jobs, for example. I promise at some point he heard, no one's going to use a company named Apple. No serious business professional is going to use a computer called Apple. You need a name like Microsoft or International Business Machine, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You think about today the compounding brand advantage Apple has against, uh, brands like that. That's and it's just a happy name. It's just a very happy, high-ceiling name.

Okay. All right. That's a fair, that's a fair reason to choose a name. It sounds happy.

Yeah.

Your angel investors. So you have some big name Twitter people. Tell them again. Sahil Bloom. Do you say Austin Reef?

Austin Reef, Kathy McCormick, Sahil Bloom. Some cases it's, it's like through their fund, but it's them. Um, sure.

How have they been as angel investors? What is that process?

Angel investors are some of the highest leverage people you can have on your cap table because here's how it works. If you get a big name fund, like a VC fund on your cap table, they're not going to be super incentivized to actually like move mountains for you unless you're a big portion of their fund, right? Unless you can materially affect their returns or unless they think that they can get a bigger bite of you at a future round, right? So they're not the ones who are going to be the most helpful in most cases, but the angel investors, these are people, right? These are just people who you can call, text. They've been operators in many cases. They have big audiences. It's a lot easier to work with and they're great people, thankfully. So yeah, their audiences were a big help to me.

You know, Sahil's background, I believe, was in investment banking. I can't remember exactly what it was, but something in finance. Was that why he was attracted to it? Or how did you get, how did you get, let's say, him interested in investing in something like this?

I don't know. I think it was either Austin Reef or Pathy McCormick of like kind of the angels who started the train. Of deciding to come in. And I am— I think there's— they might share that they're investing in this. And I don't remember what's all— we just had a very good call and he was very decisive early, and he's been an enormous help. He's an incredible guy as well, so I'm very lucky to, to work with him.

All right, I got some rapid-fire questions for you.

Let's do it.

Is that cool?

I'm fired up. Yeah.

What do you love about this business?

I love that anyone can be a customer, like anyone, any business, so long as you pass email checks. So that's great.

Just pass your what checks?

Just like onboarding checks, right? So long as you pass compliance requirements as a business, we can serve you in the US. Cool.

What do you hate about this business?

Hate is a strong word, but there is, there's definitely a grass is greener dynamic of seeing like very high margin SaaS products, like enterprise sales where they're pulling in like millions per deal. And it's, in my opinion, it's just as difficult to win the average small business. So that's, it's a grass is greener dynamic for sure, but I strongly prefer this on net margins.

Okay. Well, you stole my next question. You know, real estate guys typically look at, at business guys and they're like, oh man, I wish I had the cash flow from those businesses. And then business guys look at real estate and they're like, man, I wish I had that asset that was just growing every single year. Steady Eddie, not a lot to worry about. Everybody's jealous of everybody else. As you sit and look, are you the most jealous of? What businesses are you the most jealous of?

I like our play just because— so the trade-off of that, Nick, is that the TAM is enormous in financial services. So once you get to profitability and $16 trillion, that's the most exciting part, and that's the part that we get into in year 5, 6. But jealous in the short run, like, yeah, someone selling to a gigantic bank for, you know, a $5 million contract or inviting them out to lunch 2 times, that's attractive.

I'm not— yeah, I'm not saying you're like, oh, I'm jealous, I wish I was doing that instead of what I'm doing, But you look at people and you're like, man, that must be so nice to just have a customer base every single month, recurring revenue. Yeah, it's just natural for us to look at some comparisons.

Selling gigantic banks. Yeah, I would say that's the one that hits me.

Okay. What keeps you up at night? What's on your mind in terms of risks to your business right now?

I would say like maintaining the same level of quality that we have in terms of customer support as we scale to 10,000 businesses and 20,000. That's something that I focus on. Hmm.

Okay. And what are you obsessed with right now?

I'm pretty maniacal about our costs. Like I fight every single one of our vendors. And when we deal with a software vendor, it's the worst because it's all margin. They're going to hand wave all margin for them. So I know that they'll do the deal if it's $1,000 versus $20,000. It's just, it's gravy for them. Right. So what I'm obsessed with is getting those down so I can pass back. Yeah. The economics of the customer.

Is there anything non-business related that you're obsessed with right now? Like non-Meow related?

I watched The Three-Body Problem on Netflix. Have you seen that?

No, what is that?

Oh man, it's really good. It's, uh, it's like a sci-fi show, and I just— I've never been so captivated by a plot in my life, so I can't wait for the next season.

The Three-Body Problem?

Yeah.

All right, all right, I'm gonna take a look at it. How old are you, by the way?

Do you like sci-fi? I just turned 30.

30. Okay. I love sci-fi.

Okay, great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Freaking love sci-fi.

All right.

I, I've never asked this question, but I'm gonna ask it to you. Chris and I own a company that sells mining rigs that, so we mine, or we don't mine, excuse me, our customers mine crypto and then we sell them the rigs. We used to sell the hosting as well, but we don't sell hosting anymore.

Mm-hmm.

So I love crypto. I, I wouldn't say I am a diehard believer in crypto, but I believe it has a place. I believe it's here to stay. I think there's a lot of things about the technology that are very valuable. You worked at Gemini, you're in the financial services. What do you think is going to be the biggest and best use case of cryptocurrency, crypto technology?

Yeah, that's a great question. Historically, product market fit from crypto has been speculation, right? So Coinbase is speculate on assets, OpenSea was speculate on NFTs, etc. So a casino in a lot of ways, right? And then stablecoins are true product market fit. That's a real use case. Dollar-backed stablecoins, not like the nonsense, like algorithmic ones or ones that are uncollateralized. So USDC is serving a gigantic need. That's clear-cut. That's going to dominate. I think it's only going to grow, like the stablecoin market. Bitcoin, I'm a personal believer in. I think in a world of excess, there's only one asset in my opinion that has like a fixed supply. So hard stop there. That's all I need to know about it personally. It's not financial advice. So I would say the store of value thesis and a stablecoin. How about you, by the way?

I'll answer that in a second. When did you get into Bitcoin?

When I, I was speaking at a security conference in like 2017 and the Winklevoss twins were at that conference. A friend introduced us and that's how I got to Gemini and that's when I learned about Bitcoin for the first time.

That's rad, man. Yeah. What do I think? I think the biggest, use case, in my opinion, from cryptocurrency is going to be blockchain technology specifically as it relates to artificial intelligence and being able to divine provenance of either works. So if you're putting out a video, if you're putting out art, if you're putting out any type of content, the ability to market and say, this is, you know, Nicholas Huluski, or this is Brandon Arvanaghi's work. And you can go back and audit it through the blockchain or just as the open ledger for other types of transactions, especially, again, especially as it relates to artificial intelligence. And I think that Bitcoin itself will be a really good store of value. I, like you said, it's a finite resource similar to gold or silver. There's an actual commodity element to it. So I think it'll, I think Bitcoin will continue to stick around. I don't think the other coins have the same type of staying power. Ethereum and Solana are really interesting to me just because people are building on top of those networks. But the only coin I own, the only coins I own right now are Bitcoin and Solana. I'm not, I've never been a speculator. I've never gone and tried to trade that stuff cuz I, like you said, it's the, just the casino.

Yep. No, you're 100% right there. So yeah, I, I stick to the OG.

First.

That's awesome. But yeah, that's awesome. That makes sense.

This was fantastic, man. Where can people find you if, if they want to either get ahold of you or just learn more about Meow?

Yeah, just go to meow.com. I'm very proud we got the.com, by the way. It was not an easy journey, but that was like the last thing. Really? But yeah. Yeah.

Can you, can you share how much was it? I mean, meow.com, 4 letters.

Yeah, I cannot, uh, share.

You can't? Okay.

I, I can't unfortunately, but Yeah, that was not easy. We got the X handle as well, the YouTube handle. This was a journey. It was like collecting the Infinity Stones. Yeah, I would rather try to find the Dragon Balls and fight Vegeta, like fight everyone for them.

Oh my gosh.

I do not wish this upon maybe my worst enemy. Yeah, but I don't wish this upon the average entrepreneur to try to find these, get assets, get brands dominance.

No, the.com is incredibly important. It's 4 letters. So Chris and I bought co-founders.com for $65,000. $65,000.

That's great.

And we were like, it's one word, it's a good name, it's a good brand. Sahil and Nick Huber just recently launched virtual assistant companies, and Huber just bought somewhere.com. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not a fan of the name of somewhere.com for his specific business, but I get it. It's one word, it's memorable, it's short. That was not a cheap domain. Domains are still important.

Yeah, I'm a domain nerd and I think, yeah, I, it's like digital, it's like beachfront real estate when you have a good one, right? Or like real estate in Manhattan. So it's only gonna get more valuable in my opinion.

Totally. I totally agree. All right, man. Well, this was fantastic. I hope you have a good weekend. I'll tell people to check you out on, on Twitter and we'll talk soon.

Thanks, thanks. Such a pleasure.