Andrew D'souza - Co-Founder & CEO at Clearbanc; $1B invested in 3,300 + online businesses

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What is going on everyone? Kasey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Andrew D' Souza here with us. Andrew D' Souza is the CEO and founder of ClearBank. Prior to ClearBank, Andrew has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and is an advisor and investor to companies such as Wealthsimple, Properly and Tulip Retail. Prior to ClearBank, Andrew was the president of Nemi, a wearable platform focused on identity and security in COO of education startup Tophat. If you're not familiar with ClearBank, they offer startups an alternative to VC in the form of non dilutive revenue share agreements, coupling data and machine learning technology. ClearBank is quick to make decisions about potential investments and has invested more than $1 billion into 3,300 plus companies to date. With that being said, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Share this episode with a friend because I know you are going to love it. And and last but not least, enjoy today's episode with Andrew d'. Souza. All right, what is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Andrew D' Souza here with us, the CEO and founder of ClearBank. Thanks so much for coming on Andrew.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

So first off, I'm not only very familiar with ClearBank, but what you guys have created for founders is quite phenomenal. I know in a recent Crunchbase article the way that the way they described it is you guys offer startups an alternative to VC in the form of non dilutive revenue share agreements. I'd love for you to go over what you guys have created for founders because you Guys have not only brought so much growth to different companies, but you guys are really making a name for yourself.

I appreciate that. Yeah, look, I mean, I, you know, I spent the last decade of my career raising capital. And, you know, I was, you know, I was not from sort of Silicon Valley. My family moved to Canada when I was very young and studied engineering and then moved out to Silicon Valley in 2010. And across the last four businesses, I've probably taken a thousand investor meetings and seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Mostly the amount of time that it takes to raise capital. I remember you getting on planes, you're spending several months meeting investors, pitching, and then eventually you give up a huge chunk of your business. I always talk about half my job has been raising capital, half the job was spending capital. And I think it just ends up being this constant cycle of you give up a bunch of your business, then you have investors you've got to manage. And I think there's a real important place for venture capital and equity in building a sort of startup when you're trying to de risk the business. When you're investing in R and D and product development, you're kind of like, I'm not sure if this is going to work. But once you're investing in sales and marketing, and once it's like. Or things like inventory or things like infrastructure, where it's like, look, I put a dollar in, more than a dollar comes out, and there's not that much risk anymore, equity starts to feel very expensive and debt starts to feel very risky. Right. Because even at the later stage, it comes with personal guarantees and covenants. And if you trip up a covenant, then you lose your business or you could lose your home. And so what we really created was something that sits in between which says, look for the repeatable parts of your business. Let us fund it on a revenue share, because you know that the revenue is going to come. You've got a lot of confidence. We'll ride the ups and downs of the seasonality and the revenue share with you. So for things like marketing, which we've been doing now for several years, is we funded over a million dollars of marketing capital. We'll give you $100,000 to spend on marketing. You give us 5% of your sales until you give us 106 back. And that's the typical deal structure. Right? And it could take six months, it could take 12 months, but we've put out over a billion and a half dollars through that product. We'll go as low as 10,000 all the way up to $10 million to fund a business like that. And that's sort of the first product that we created. And we recently launched an inventory product which does the same thing. We say, we'll buy your inventory for you, you pay us back as every unit sells, and we'll hold the risk alongside you. And so the real goal here has been to help be a partner to founders and help them give them some more options.

Love that, man. And you guys have done quite that, for sure. I think it says on the website 3300/online businesses you guys have invested into.

Yeah.

What was the first, you know, first 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 businesses that you guys invested into when you were proving the concept. And for people that don't know. When did Clearbank launch?

Yes, we started in 2015, really with this mission of helping sort of online and digital entrepreneurs. And, you know, we did a lot of. We started with gig economy, like, you know, Uber drivers and doordash drivers, and we started with. With Airbnb hosts and people that are running vacation rental businesses. But E commerce really started in 2017. We started to scale, and that's where we found, you know, we found a lot of. A lot of demand and a lot of need for our products. My co founder is on the Canadian version of Shark Tank called Dragon's Den. Michelle and I remember the first. One of the first businesses we did actually was a company from the show who was coming on, and they were like, look, they built these, like, you know, artisan iPhone cases made out of, like, you know, balsa wood. And they were going to sell 50% of their business for, like $200,000 or something. And Michelle's like, why don't we just. Why don't I just give you the money and then you give us. You give me a share of the revenue until I make my investment back, plus a return we can negotiate. She's like, I don't want you to sell. Like, the other challenge with owning a part of the business is then at some point you've got to sell it, Right? And so it was this father son team, and they're like, they don't want to sell the business. And so we've got to be able to structure this so that we can invest in the company. We can help them grow, but we don't need to. We don't need them to go and sell the business. We don't need them to go IPO for us to get our money back. And so those were the first. The first handful of businesses were, you know, online businesses that, you know, where equity investments didn't necessarily make sense.

I love that. And I know you guys specialize in mainly online businesses. Do you guys plan on venturing off into different sectors of businesses?

Yeah, so we do. We started in just E commerce, you know, consumer E commerce. We've launched into digital products and software businesses. We have a whole B2B SaaS team now that is, that is funding, you know, B2B and subscription SaaS companies. And now we're starting to explore other, you know, other verticals. But to be honest, in today's world, every business is a digital business. Right. You have to think of yourself as e commerce first. And so that's really what we focus on. And we focus on businesses that can use our capital to scale. So if you're a restaurant and you can only serve customers within a certain number of miles from your restaurant, it's probably not a good use. But if you're selling a product or service online that you can sell to anybody in the world, then we're going to be a great partner with you.

Yep, I love that. How does it work with SaaS companies? Is it, you know, for E commerce, it's inventory and ad spend is the same for SaaS companies, but more so for their digital product or the service that they're offering.

I mean, if you think about it, it's, you know, the equivalent is sales and marketing. Right. So it's customer acquisition and infrastructure. Right. So it's like, okay, you know, my AWS and my, you know, my services that I use to build, build and run my product and it's the same thing. And we look at your recurring customers, your, you know, how, how frequently, you know, what's your churn rate, what's your net dollar retention? We can help you advance up to up to two years of your of your recurring billing. So. Very cool. Yeah, so that's the way that we work with, with SaaS businesses.

Very cool. Touching on something you brought up at the beginning regarding vc. An alternative that I'm sure people have heard about nowadays is the equity crowdfunding. And I know last week it was where the REG CF you could raise up to $5 million and then the REG A plus you can raise up to 75 million. What's your thoughts on crowdfunding, equity, crowdfunding and just that whole sector of raising capital?

Yeah, I think, you know, look, I think it depends on your uses of fund. The thing that I always encourage entrepreneurs to think about is match your sources and uses of funds. And you got to figure out if you're investing in R and D, then equity is a really good. If you're investing in R and D, in product development, equity is a great option. It's probably the right. Because you could invest half a million dollars and it may not turn into anything or it may take five years for it to break even. And that's where you want to be spending your equity dollars. If you're investing in things that are repeatable and scalable, then there are better alternatives. Right. And that's what we're trying to develop at Clearbank. And so, you know, once you've decided, hey, I'm investing in R and D and product development and so I want to raise equity, then it's just about what's the, what's the easiest and most favorable path for me to raise equity. You know, do I go talk to a vc, do I go talk to angels, Do I go to an equity crowdfunding platform? You know, those, those make, you know, those make sense in different situations. But step one is make sure that you're not raising equity for, for the wrong purposes. Because the challenge with equity is you can never get it back once you've sold equity. You have shareholders and you've got obligations to those shareholders and they're going to have demands. And effectively you have a boss. And so maybe if you're doing it through a crowdfunding, you've got 100 bosses, but they're all very small. And so that might be a little bit easier, but then you also have to manage those hundred shareholders. And so it's not, it's kind of a one directional, it's a one way street. When you choose to raise equity and you want to be very deliberate about it and, and the uses of that equity capital.

Very cool. How have you guys adapted this year in 2020 with everything that's happened? Covid working remotely, how have you grown from that and what have you learned?

Yeah, I think being a Zoom CEO is one skill that I never thought I would need to develop. I had to eat my words probably a year ago today. I think late, late last year, I said, we're never going to be a remote company. I was like, the magic in the office is just so powerful. Right. And we hire. One of the things about Clearbank, when you talk to anybody on our team, we're all founders, right. Like, we think of the company as being built by founders for founders. And so every single person in the company has their own founder story. Maybe they came from an entrepreneurial family and their family moved to Canada or America and started a business. Maybe they've been running a side business, maybe they started a club or a nonprofit in school. But they've all been through that process of creating something out of nothing and they know how hard that is. And so there's a ton of passion and empathy for the portfolio companies and the customers. And I remember being so driven by that passion and creativity and I was like, well, this will never translate into a remote world. And here we are 2020 and we've been forced to. And I think the team has really adapted really well. I don't know how well I've adapted, to be honest, but the team has adapted really well to, to translating that enthusiasm, that passion and organizing their lives around it. So I think that's probably been the biggest adjustment is just our ability to collaborate and communicate. We've brought on some great leaders who have done this before because remote communication is a different skill set, it's a different muscle that I hadn't developed. And so we had to look externally and bring in some fantastic people there. But look, the nice thing is our model had never required, you know, we didn't require, you know, face to face meetings or input. You know, it's all data driven. And so, yep, you know, we hadn't, from a business standpoint, we hadn't missed a beat. Right. Like E commerce has just blown up. Yep. A lot of VCs have, you know, a lot of VCs and banks and other sources of funding have really had to scramble because it required you meeting or going into an office and you know, like all of that structure, like we never had that. And so from a business standpoint, it's actually been really good and we've had the data to be able to help continue to accelerate through Covid to support our customers that are growing. And then from a sort of culture standpoint, we've had to adapt. And I think I'm pretty proud of the team and the way they've been able to do that.

Very cool. When it comes to the two day process of if a founder comes to Clearbank and wants to needs that capital, how is it that you guys can provide funds so quickly? I know that you guys stand on that as being able to do it in a quick manner, but what is it that gives you guys the ability to do that for the people that might have missed that?

Yeah, so it's really that we're plugged into so much data that, you know, so the process within Minutes. You can plug in your data and you can get an offer, right? And so you get an offer, you look through it, you talk. We have, you know, you could talk to somebody on our team, on our investment team, if you have questions, or you can just select one. But so the offer generation takes very, very. It's very, very quickly. And then once the company's selected the offer, we complete our sort of compliance requirements, like, do we know who is this person? Who are we sending money to? You know, all of that stuff. And that may take a day or two, but, yeah, we turn it around very, very quickly. And so, you know, it's not the. Probably one of the biggest things that I found when I was raising capital for my businesses was there's this whole process. There's a song and dance of, like, let me go pitch you my vision. And like, do you, you know, do I look like a founder that you backed and made money on before? And, you know, like, there's this whole, like, sort of subjective component to investment decision making that we just have ignored. We've been like, look, we just don't think that. We think that's very biased, and we don't think that leads to the best outcomes. And we think that cuts out a huge segment of. You know, what I think are passionate, driven, talented people that are solving really hard problems and building important businesses because they don't have a warm intro, they don't speak like the people that went to Harvard and raised venture capital. Or they may be building a product that I don't relate to. Right. They might be building a product for African American women, or they might be building a product for certain group of people, but it doesn't matter, right? If, like, you know, we have a bunch of companies who, like, build hair products, I have no reason to, like, care about a hair product, but that's okay because they have lots of customers and their customers love them and they know how to find more of them. And so if we. If you just focus on the data, you know, you can. You can build technology to make those decisions for you. You take a lot of the bias out of it. And that's the reason why we've invested in, you know, eight times more women than venture capital has. It's the reason why we've invested in founders from every. All 50 states in the US where, you know, venture capital is really concentrated in three or four states, you know, because you don't need to. You don't need to look in, you know, you don't need to look like somebody don't need a warm intro to us. And so that's the way we've been able to do that much faster.

That's, that's amazing, man. When it comes to your background prior to Clearbank, I know that you said you raised capital for those businesses. I'd love to touch on some of those past businesses and more so how you even started your first business. Because a lot of young entrepreneurs listen to this and they may be going through that process right now.

Yeah, yeah. So I was, you know, it was funny. So I studied in engineering, I worked in strategy consulting for a couple years. And then I got a call from a guy named Chamath who is head of growth at Facebook. He's now like a very vocal and controversial figure, but he's also, he's also Canadian, Canadian immigrant. Went to Waterloo about 10 years before me. And he was starting a company called Top Prospect in the Talent Space. And he was, he was building a team for that. And so that's kind of what brought me to Silicon Valley was I was running biz dev for this company that was basically helping people recruit, helping new companies recruit through their network. And it was interesting because I met, we had Andreessen Horowitz, that was an investor. We had all these amazing investors. And I met the portfolio, I met the team at Slack before they were even Slack. I met the team at Instagram and I was like, these people are no different than my friends back in Canada that were starting company. They just happen to be in the middle of Silicon Valley. They happen to have the network, they happen to have access to capital and media. But in terms of talent and ambition, they're no different than my friends back home that were building businesses. That was really the eye opening piece for me was that it's access to opportunity, access to talent, access capital and network. And if you could do that, I don't think Silicon Valley's monopolized entrepreneurial talent. And so that was sort of my mission. And so as I joined, then I joined a Canadian company in the education space and helped them raise a couple rounds of funding and help them build a go to market and sales team. And that was sort of my role was join a company, help them raise capital, help them build up, go to market. And then I was like, well, why are we raising all this money and taking on these board members and giving up control? You know, just to invest in sales and marketing that we know is going to work. And that was a big part of, that was a big part of the inspiration Around Clearbank.

Very cool. And with Clearbank now, what is your day to day look like when it comes to managing team? Especially being remote now, like, where do you spend most of your time nowadays?

Yeah, I'm very easily distracted. I have a lot of ideas around what the future of entrepreneurship and how to fund these entrepreneurs and help them win. And my team actually got me a gumball machine because they were like, put all of your ideas in this gumball machine, and when we finish one, you can take a new one out. I spent a lot of my time brainstorming, a lot of my time. We structure the team so that we've got general managers for every sort of product line. So one that leads our inventory products and our marketing product and the treasury products and different things. And so I spent a lot of my time just brainstorming with them, thinking through sort of what the market opportunity is and where they could go. And then probably one of my favorite things to do is put people in the perfect roles to succeed. And that's always changing because the company's changing and the market's changing and our strategy. So it's like, all right, let me understand. If you think of every person as like, a little jigsaw puzzle piece, and then you've just got to slot them in the right role. So we've had people who have been not doing, you know, they're super talented. We hired them for a reason. But for whatever reason, sort of the company is, like, evolved, and they're sort of, like, drowning in their current role. And I'm like, well, what if you just changed your role a little bit and, like, moved it to the side and, like, got rid of this stuff and added this stuff, and then all of a sudden you put them in the right spot and they, like, do incredibly well. That's like one of my favorite. Like, it's like the satisfying click in the, like, you know, in the puzzle. And so that's one of my favorite things. I actually try and spend a lot of time doing that, and I do that for myself. I sort of think through, like, hey, you know, as CEO, I'm like, there's parts of my job that I'm not very good at. And so let me, like, let me find somebody who's going to love that stuff and be way better and let me focus my time on the things that I really love. And so, you know, that's. That's. I think that's probably a big chunk of my time is just spending time with the team, understanding what the match is between what people love, doing, what they're really good at, and what the company needs and shaving off and adding to the roles in the organization to make sure that everybody is sort of like firing on all cylinders.

Yep. I love that, man. How big is the team now at Clearbank?

So we're just about 250 people.

250. Wow. Yeah, that's. I'm sure being remote has been a challenge.

We've hired close to 100 people since we've been remote, and so it's. You never know how. You don't know how tall anybody is. It's funny because you see them on these, like, zoom boxes and I'm like, can't wait to meet these people in person. But, yeah, that's definitely been interesting. For sure.

Absolutely. I read somewhere that you compared ClearBank to SoftBank, and obviously they're very different in their approach. VC to investing into sales and inventory. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because obviously ClearBank, I've heard of them just in the news. I don't have any association with them. But what's the comparison there and how are they different for founders?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think our. I think what I. What I was saying, like, was like, we want to be bigger than SoftBank. I think that's. As we start to think through SoftBank, they raised $100 billion and they invested in like, 10 companies. Right. We want to be 100 billion, but we want to invest it into 10 million companies. Right. That's our vision is. I think what they did was they sort of completely disrupted the way that we thought about venture capital and how it worked. I don't know if that strategy worked, but we want to rethink the way the capital is allocated to founders and entrepreneurs. I think the big difference is we want to use technology. There's no way we could hire people to go and meet 10 million entrepreneurs around the world. So we need to use technology and infrastructure to be able to do that at scale. But we want to have a meaningful impact and shake up the way that entrepreneurs think about how to fund their business.

Yeah, absolutely. When you say technology, are you referring to AI? Is that a big component on what you guys do?

Yeah, yeah, it's a really important component. So to date, we've used a lot of AI in helping founders make better decisions around or in helping us understand sort of what the revenue will look like and make those investment decisions. Now what we're starting to do is actually repackage that and help the founders that we back make better decisions with how to spend that money. So it's like, hey, did you know that you're in the top 10% of from a click through rate on your ads, but you're in the bottom 10% on the conversion rate on your website? And so stop spending your time and energy on ad creative and start spending time on your website optimization and your page load times and those things that drive conversion on your site. Because people love your ads, they're just not buying. And so we're starting to, because we have so much data and because we've seen so many businesses, we're, we can very accurately benchmark and say, look, here's what you can do. And by the way, here's a partner of ours that's actually done this for 10 other companies that look like you. And so that's sort of the next phase is using that AI to basically help people. Just put our thumb on the scale for our founders and help them give them an unfair advantage.

Love that for sure. I want to go back into when you were in college, did you go to college? What did your early childhood look like if we were to take a big step back for a second?

Yeah, so I, so yeah, I was born in India. My family moved to, we lived in Chicago for a couple years and then moved to Canada when I just started school. And I studied engineering. I loved cars in high school, you know, so it was like I'd always, I'd always been an entrepreneur and like I started like mowing lawns and walking dogs or whatever I could do to like earn some money to go to the movies with my friends. I remember that stuff. And I was like, okay, someday I'm gonna buy a car, right? And I'm like, I love cars. Was like super. I was kind of a gearhead and I studied engineering really to like build and design cars.

Okay.

And I think my first internship when I was 18 years old in engineering school was a GM and I was like in the, you know, I was like working with robots that were doing the welding on the, and paint the cars. And I love the work. Like, I love building stuff, but I just realized like how far away I was and I was ever going to be from like the direction of where GM was going to go as a company. Right. I was like, okay, like, do I want to be a plant manager? What is that like, you know, what is that career path? And so I kind of realized that the startup and entrepreneurial path was the only place where I could get my Hands dirty, like actually, you know, do stuff right. You know, write code like build things, be an individual contributor, but also influence the strategy of a company. And I think, you know, I think in a big organization it's hard to do both. You can, you can be involved in strategy, but then you don't get your hands dirty. You can be involved in like building, but you actually don't influence the strategy. And so that was a big part of the motivation was I love the engineering side of my brain, but I also like the impact and sort of, you know, where things could go.

Yeah. When did you make that decision to just let go of GM and dive into the entrepreneur space?

Yeah, it was, I mean, it was over the course of, you know, so I did. One of the nice things about Waterloo I went to school was you get to do these internships over time. And so, you know, every four months I was going to do another full time internship. So I tried a whole bunch of different internships. I did one at McKinsey, which really opened my eyes to what the strategy looked like. But you know, at the end of the day it was like, look, I'm, I'm building PowerPoint slides and Excel models, but I'm not actually building, you know, I'm not accountable to those results. And so I think it was, I got, I got a flavor of the building at GM, I got a flavor of the strategy at McKinsey. And I was really looking for, you know, the perfect combination of both. And that's where I was like, I've got to go into startups because. Because that was the only way to meld them.

Yeah, love that. When it comes to the future of VC funding, I know that you guys are very different than that. What are some of the downsides that you would tell entrepreneurs to watch out for? Because nowadays there's so many different ways to bring in funds to your business. Whether that's just selling your product or raising through crowdfunding or going to a VC or now you using a platform like ClearBank? Just what are some of the downsides of VC or benefits that you've seen personally? And what's your advice to just entrepreneurs going to raise capital that it's their first time doing so?

Yeah. So I think one of the challenges, the VC business model requires an exit first of all. So they sit on they own part of your company and they need to get their money back somehow. So at some point they're going to say, when are you exiting the business? Right. When are you selling or when are you Ipoing and you've got to have an answer. And that timeline may not line up with your investor's timeline. And then I think what VC is designed to do is say, look, we've got this really smart person that's accomplished all these great things. We're going to package this person with some money and this is the deal. And I think it'd be interesting if you could disaggregate that and say, hey, can I just pay for the person? Like can I get you as a consultant or an advisor or you know, coach or an independent board member? And then can I just get the capital? Like, can I actually sort of disaggregate this? And venture capital is sort of like bundled it all together. The real challenge though is it's a marriage, right? So once you've sold equity in your company, you're kind of stuck with that investor and that firm forever, especially if they sit on your board. And I remember my last business prior to Clearbank, we sort of, we ran a really, you know, we needed a bunch of money. It was a hardware company and we were launching and we needed to buy a bunch of inventory and make a bunch of investments and tooling and all of this stuff. And we're like, okay, well let's run a six week process. Let's meet every investor we can. And we took the investor. They gave us the best terms. We didn't really know them.

Yeah.

And they joined our board and you know, a few months later we had a board meeting and we missed some numbers and they were like, look, we're just going to fire the whole management team and bring in our own people. And that was sort of, you know, that was the end of it. And did they do that? Yeah. And that was, you know, I was like, I was left without a job pretty quickly. So I remember, you know, I was hired to go and raise the round of funding. Raise the round. And I was like leading the go to market. And yeah, one board meeting, we basically, you know, came out of it and the board was like, nope, you're out. And so, you know, I think that was, that was pretty eye opening for me. It was definitely a humbling moment. And I think for me I was like, well this, you know, I sort of, you know, played back the previous year of my life and how I got there and I was like, oh man. We like, you know, so from, from that point on we've really only taken on investors, you know, in Clearbank as people that I have a lot of trust and I'VE probably known for a long time. I've established trust and I've thoroughly, thoroughly referenced. So we've just been very, very judicious about the partners that we take on. Because once you give up equity, you don't get it back.

Yep, absolutely. When it comes to being involved with different companies early on and being an investor in them, what's your advice to entrepreneurs when it comes to building their team initially to get prepared to whether they go raise a round of funding or go through a platform like Clearbank? Like, what's your advice for the setup for that founder?

Yeah, I mean, when you talk about team, I think a lot of it, the way that I've done it has been start with yourself and sort of say, look, how do I want to spend my day? Right. What are the things that, you know, when I wake up and I look at my calendar, what are the things I want more of and what are the things I want less of? And let me start to reshape my role so that I'm doing more of the things that I like and less of the things that I don't like, because I'm going to be good at the things that I like doing. And let me go find somebody who likes doing the stuff that I don't like. And that's effectively the way that we've brought on people. We brought on a CFO that has been a fantastic partner for us through what has been like a crazy year, because he just loves doing all the stuff that Michelle and I are not good at. And that's been sort of the way that we've evolved the business. And then I think the other part of it is just. It's this. This combination of aligned sort of values, but probably differing perspectives and experience. Right. I think sometimes people fall into the trap of, you know, I want to hire my friends who all agree with me, and we'll have a lot of fun. We've certainly hired, you know, close friends and people that we've grown up with, but I think it's got to be, you know, in a lot of ways, you want people that share your values and share the passion for the. The mission and the destination, but are gonna challenge you. Right. And there's going to be a lot of friction. They're gonna come in with different perspectives. I think that's one of the most important things, is creating that healthy discourse. Cause often if there's a lot of mutual respect. But differing opinions usually come to a better answer. Uncover opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise seen.

Absolutely. Last question before we wrap this up, Andrew. And that is just looking forward into the future. What are you most excited about at Clearbank and what should the people listening today expect?

Yeah, I think we're just getting started, right? I mean, we've backed 3,300 businesses. That's like we're just scratching the surface around the product offerings that we can have for every type of business across the stack. And what I'm really excited about is taking sort of that special sauce of venture capital that is like capital combined with advice, combined with a network and productizing it and scaling it. Right. And so really saying, look, we have a very, very powerful network of partners and an ecosystem. We have a ton of data that we can actually package into advice and insights and then obviously we have capital. But sort of thinking about that from a platform and product standpoint instead of a people centric approach. Because venture capital only scales with the number of smart people that you can hire to be VCs and they only have so much time in the day to meet so many founders, to sit on so many boards. We want to sort of decouple that whole thing and say, look, we want to actually be partners with you if you're a great founder with an ambitious objective. We don't have the constraints that a VC does in terms of headcount and time. So that's sort of the next chapter is kind of putting our thumb on the scale and helping shift the balance of power. I think I always talk to our team about this, but for all of history, the people with the money got to decide what got built, right? Which castles got built, which roads got built, which universities and which projects get funded at those universities. And I think for the first time, it's really the people with the ideas and the people with the energy and the risk appetite that get to decide what gets built. And the capital is just a commodity in that whole ecosystem and we want to help accelerate that.

I love that. Well, where is the best place where everyone can follow you and follow ClearBank if they don't already?

Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter@Andrew D' Souza or on LinkedIn and then just, you know, head over to clearbank.com send us an email and we'd be happy to help. You can sign up, actually, you can sign up right on the website and you can basically take access.

Awesome.

Take offer there. Yeah, amazing.

Well, Andrew, thank you so much for coming to show, man. I had a great time.

This is great. Thanks so much, Casey. Appreciate it.

Yep.

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