Brandon Arvanaghi | Exclusive Forbes Full Interview

Brandon, it's so great to be here with you today.

It's a pleasure. I'm having so much fun right now.

Me too, honestly. So let's start off by talking to me about exactly what Meow does.

Meow is a high-interest banking platform. So it's like, look, if you go to Costco, you feel like you're getting a good price, right? The reason that happens is because Costco basically went to bat for you with their suppliers. They beat them down on price. They got you a good price regardless of how rich you are. What if someone applied that to business checking accounts? So that's what we're doing. We beat down banks, our banking partners, on price, and what we do is anyone who onboards to Meow to get a business checking account, they can feel like they're getting a really good interest rate through the platform.

And how exactly are you doing that?

So there's only been a few companies that have ever successfully attracted business banking deposits as a fintech facing the startup market, and so we had a lot of social proof with us when we went to these banking partners. So we said, look guys, if you guys give us a really good rate, we'll attract more customers to use your platform. And they said, okay, fine, let's see what you can do. And thankfully we crossed over a billion in assets on the platform through that. So that's, that's why we had leverage here.

Very cool. Now take me back to the beginning. I want to hear all about your founding story.

Yeah, so my co-founder and I, we wanted to start a company our whole lives. Thankfully COVID came around and it was a little bit easier to raise funding. We didn't know any VCs. He quit his job at Facebook. He just moved into an apartment with me. We just started coding nonstop. Yeah. Thankfully, we got our first check, an investor who believed in us. And one thing led to another. We built a great team and we built a good company since then, thankfully.

Very cool. What was it like, you know, switching into entrepreneurship and taking on that challenge for the first time?

It was terrifying.

Yeah.

I mean, quitting our jobs and not having any kind of fallback, any income, any plan really, was kind of scary. It was like the abyss. It's like staring into the darkness and not knowing what's there. And we just kind of coded our way out of it. And thankfully, we could see a light at the end of the tunnel, which was just our first customer and our first angel check.

Was there a moment for you where you thought, like, hey, I think that this risk is actually going to pay off?

You have this kind of blind confidence in yourself and your team, but that kind of abyss never quite goes away. Elon Musk talks about how a startup is staring into the abyss and chewing glass, and then eventually it's just chewing glass. So that's the best we can hope for on any given day, is just chewing glass daily.

That's a good way to put it.

Very visual. Yeah, exactly.

What's been the most challenging part about running NIO?

Challenging part is We're trying to do everything with the leanest team possible. So when we crossed $1 billion in assets on the platform, Meow Technologies Inc., we were 12 people. That leads to problems, but it leads to opportunities. I mean, being so lean, every dollar we save, we can feasibly pass back to our customers. But that means we're constantly underwater. So we have to figure out how to further automate, make this like the most efficient platform possible. That's, that's really the challenge for us.

Speaking of automation, how are you thinking about AI and how that's going to play a role in your business, if at all?

Yeah, you know, AI is— there's a lot of hand-waving about AI, but one thing it certainly does is it roots out inefficiencies, and that can lead to cost savings. You know, maybe an entire department can be replaced by software. And if you can do that in financial services, then you can give small businesses the opportunity to earn meaningful yields that maybe wouldn't have been profitable to onboard them without that kind of innovation. So we're definitely looking at it from that perspective.

Have you started using it at all, or is that kind of a future thing for you?

We're getting pitched on it daily, as you can imagine. Like, the money's flying for AI. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we're kind of like in the medium stages with a couple firms right now, which is pretty exciting. Very cool.

So speaking of getting pitched and money flying, I definitely want to hear about your fundraising journey. Walk me through that and where you're at today.

Yeah, so we've raised $30 million to date about. This is our first company, and that's kind of a high number for a first-time founder with my co-founder Bryce. So the hardest part was getting the first check, 'cause when you don't know any VCs, every VC is basically looking for social proof. Like, who else has invested in you? You don't have a good answer for that when you're starting out. So you have to find that one VC who believes in you before anyone else does, and that's super rare. That was a guy named Charlie Songers for us. And one thing led to another. When people saw Charlie invested, then it's like, okay, maybe I can invest too. And then kept going and going. Thankfully we raised some money and we can do some big things with it, I think. What was your pitch, or what do you think got Charlie to actually say, like, "Alright, I'll give these guys a chance." Well, he was a history nerd like me, so I was just pitching on, like, the history of money and things like, things you would never put in a pitch.

Right.

But thankfully he understood what I was trying to communicate behind the scenes, like, there's a real business here to be done. So, if I didn't get a smart person like him on the call, like, it would have gone the way of every other VC I talked to before that. Definitely. Yeah.

And what has fundraising afforded you? What have you been able to do because of it?

Yeah, it allows us to make 5, 6, 7-year bets. So we have like 10+ years of runway, right? Like, we're very conservative with our money. And what Jeff Bezos talks about is when your company makes bets that are in the 4, 5, 6-year range for an ROI, you're not really competing with anyone. Everyone's kind of thinking quarter to quarter, year to year. But if I can make a long-term bet that pays off in 6 years, think about the magic we can create as a business. The value we can create to maybe underserved communities, underserved businesses. That's, that's what I'm getting excited about.

That's great. Talk to me about your customers. Who are they? How many do you have? And if you're able to name any, I would love to hear them.

Yeah, so we've traditionally served the startup market, like C to Series D. Our backers never thought that we'd be able to get to the traction that we have, thankfully, but we've gotten there. And now I really believe in this vision of keeping our costs so low that we can serve the smallest businesses that would not get attractive rates elsewhere because their deposit sizes aren't enough. So we're, we're going downmarket basically to small businesses, you know, getting profitable on them too. And that's going to open up the door to, I hope, every business in America basically using the platform.

Can you talk to me a bit about your competition? Who are they and what sets you apart from them?

It's a good question. So something that resonated with us, my co-founder told me, look, we should never focus on the competition. Jeff Bezos says if you success over the customer, you don't even need to think about your competitors at that point. So we do— you know, there are major banks that are competing with us. There are major fintechs that are competing with us like ourselves that have $14 billion valuations, $100 billion valuations, thousands of people. And we're sitting here at 15 going head to head with them. But we just focus on the customers. They kind of guide us to the right path anyway. So we don't— we don't try to think about competitors that much.

That makes sense. And you said you focus a lot on startups.

Yeah.

How was it earlier this year with the whole Silicon Valley Bank collapse? What did that mean for you and your business?

Seriously? Yeah. When SVB collapsed, we saw more than half a billion in inflows to our platform. Yes, that was crazy. We were on like 2 phone calls at once for most of the day. It was a scary situation for a lot of people. And I remember I saw a VC, a prominent VC, make a LinkedIn post or something that said, this is so ridiculous. People are concerned about Silicon Valley Bank and they're moving to a fintech called Meow. And we're not a bank, obviously, we're fintech, but that was kind of what put us on the map is we were there, we helped a lot of customers get bank accounts through our banking partners at that point.

How did you pitch these startups that had just kind of lost everything? Did you reach out to them? Did they find you?

Yeah, so it was in the panic mode that a lot of them reached out to us. I mean, we're never gonna see an event like that from our company's perspective where it's just inbounds, inbounds, inbounds constantly. I mean, we were not sleeping, honestly. It was like 3 hours of sleep that night. I had a terrible cold. It was a terrible, terrible time to get a cold. Yeah.

Of course.

But it was just— people were looking for lifeboats at that time. They were scared about losing their money. And that's a terrifying situation. I don't want anyone to ever feel like that again. But yeah, that was definitely a moment where Meow was no longer just a funny name, but it was a meaningful company for a lot of people.

Well, that's a perfect segue. Tell me about how you came up with the name.

You know, the investors who passed on us, they said we would never see $1,000 come to Meow. We'd never see $100,000 with the name Meow. And we're over $1 billion on the platform. I still get questions about the name. Like, it's a happy, high-ceiling— there's dopamine in the name. Yeah. When you say it, it just makes you happy. And if I was going for like a single or a double, I would have named it something more boring, right? But Bryce and I wanted to be a household name with unlimited potential. And why not just pick the happiest, highest-ceiling name you could I can think of.

Do you love cats? Is that why?

I'm a dog person. It's a crazy thing. Yeah, I like cats. Yeah, they're fine. Yeah, I like the word meow though. I respect them. It is.

It's a great word.

Yeah, I'm happy when I say it.

So what's it been like to be a young entrepreneur, especially in a finance industry where it's a very old industry? Have you had any imposter syndrome, or how does it feel?

Yeah, it's a very good question. So when you go to— we partner with banks, right? So we're not a bank ourselves, And a lot of the banks are run by, let's say, traditional folks who are a little bit skeptical about technology and newcomers, et cetera. So that's kind of doubly the case when your name is Meow Technologies Inc. But we've kind of beaten that down by showing that we can bring value to customers and attracting deposits for these banks. And the partners get it over a period of time. So I think everyone's kind of willing to adopt to the new age. Adapt, rather, and that's been really positive for us. Very cool.

What would it take for you to sell your company, and is that your goal?

It's not my goal to sell the company. What excites us at Meow is impact. So we want to become like the single gateway for businesses that are trying to access high-interest bank accounts through our banking partners, anywhere in the globe. And what gets us really excited is not hiring 1,000 people, hiring 2,000 people, like high valuations. It's getting our costs so low that we can onboard companies by the skin of our teeth, profitable unit economics on them, and serve them, whereas another bank maybe wouldn't have. Maybe, maybe they wouldn't have given them that high of an interest rate because it wouldn't be profitable. We want to be maniacally obsessed about our costs and get access to everyone. This platform.

Do you have any plans of expanding globally or where's your reach right now?

Yeah, so we just expanded into the UK, actually. Yeah, we're, we're working with a lot of the high net worth companies there for some of our offerings. And again, we start kind of upmarket in the startup world, like seed to Series D. We kind of use those revenues to then go downmarket and serve these more underserved businesses. That's what really excites us. Yeah. Yeah.

Very cool. Is there one business rule that you always operate by no matter what?

I'd say there's two. Okay. One is don't take existential risks. If you stay in the game, you win in the game. If you think about all the companies that failed, like publicly in the past 3, 4 years, they shot themselves in the foot by being greedy. Not being greedy is a superpower. If you just stay in the game, you don't take existential risks, good things happen. And the other rule is just obsess over your customer, do right by them. Jeff Bezos again says, "There's never any misalignment between shareholder value and customer satisfaction in the long run." So if you do right by your customers, you can only become a trillion-dollar company If they give you their explicit permission, they will make you the trillion-dollar company if you do right by them. It's up to them. So those are the two things that we live by, and it's thankfully worked for us.

Talk to me about a hard situation you may have faced either with a customer or an employee and how you overcame that and went through it.

I had a lot of pressure to spend the money that we raised, as you can imagine. So we haven't touched a penny of our $22 million Series A over a year and a half ago, which is really unusual. Yeah, people will pressure you to— you gotta spend to grow. How are you gonna spend— how are you gonna grow if you're not gonna spend? We got that from a lot of potential investors. A lot of our investors understood we wanted to be super conservative because we kind of saw the market. We saw where the ball was going. We saw a bear market coming around the corner like we're in right now. But thankfully, like, we have a good investing base. They understand us, they trust us, we've delivered for them. So that's been the biggest pressure we faced today.

Is there any advice you would give your younger self the day before you started your company that you wish you knew now?

That's a good question.

The—

I would say there's a difference between working hard and working smart. I had a tendency to want to scrub, like, read every page, every word of every textbook, transcribe it onto a notebook, to prove that I understood it, right? Just like ridiculous things like that. I felt like the longer hours I worked on something, the more it demonstrated like my knowledge on it. There's ways to work, be more efficient with your time without kind of hurting yourself over it. So I'd say time management's a big one, something that you have to learn as a founder ultimately.

So what's next for you? Tell me about any exciting updates or news and what are you looking forward to from Meow in 2024?

It's such a simple like business model. You know, there's an email of me that is floating around where I told one of our investors when we had like $5 million in assets on the platform that I'm not gonna be happy until we had a billion. And we crossed a billion, and now I'm telling people I'm not gonna be happy until we have 10 and then 100. What excites me is not getting whales on the platform, it's getting smaller and smaller businesses that can actually move the needle for them financially that are potentially underserved. I wanna serve every small business in the world, in America, starting with America. I just wanna keep growing this thing, just make meow. I want people to meow all over the world. I want to hear that word everywhere. It just lights me up when I say it.

I like it too. And like, how do you look at marketing then for your company? Are you one of the Subway ad peoples, or how do you go about that?

We don't believe in billboards is the thing. Like, we think every penny we spend on like marketing and ads like could be a penny that goes in the customer's pocket, right? So thankfully we've got a lot of word of mouth. It's a name you don't forget. So that really helps. The t-shirts. Really soft, and they say meow on them, so people wear them. They actually like do marketing for us, and we just spend like $10 on a t-shirt.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Okay, and what would you like your legacy to be?

Honestly, if we at the company, we just want to make an impact. We just want more people to be— we just get excited when people use the product, right?

Yeah.

And there's 30 million, what, small businesses in America. Having people use Meow to access bank accounts through our platform, I mean, that just, that would just light me up if every business was using us. I mean, that's just, that's a great legacy to have.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Brandon.

I appreciate you being here with me.

Thank you, I had a blast.

Yeah.