Cagri Karahan - Co-founder/CEO of Richify.ai

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Cagri Karahan with us today, co-founder and CEO at Richify.ai. He's an ex-Amazon, eBay, and Udemy, educated at University of California, Berkeley. So Cagri, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Yep, thanks so much for inviting me, Charles, and just thank you for the brief intro. Yeah, it has been an interesting ride through just— I'm a computer engineer by heart, builder and seller. I did my master's in Italy, just Milano. After that, I had two startups, two exits. One is on brain-computer interfaces, neuromarketing. One was on just like digital signature for shopping malls. And after that, I joined Amazon in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. So Redshift was one of the top-growing services in a top-growing AWS in Amazon. So I had an amazing ride with the team, learned a lot, spent 2 years in the Bay Area. Later on, just one missed like home and joined eBay in Istanbul. I was the head of product development, like a team of 200 amazing talent, like engineers, product managers, and designers, data scientists, et cetera. Grieve greatly. And the last 5 years I've spent at Udemy educating the world, democratizing the education through that platform. Again, we did the IPO there and then grieve the company. And recently just the company merged with Coursera, became a great, perfect merger of education. And just currently I'm up to just educating the world, increasing the world's financial literacy. Mm-hmm. Through AI. And what I believe, we should build the number one personal finance AI agent so that everybody has a perfect CFO with a very strong finance team with a very affordable way.

Interesting background, to say the least. Let's talk about your first company, right? MobileG in 2010. You got acquired on that one. How was it like to start your first company and be acquired that quick?

Yeah, I mean, it was a very fast ride. It was the wildest product market fit I've ever seen. So just like, you know, it was 2010, iOS, Android apps was like out and like that was a match for shopping malls because like this B2B business for shopping malls is like huge investment, billions of dollars on construction, high-end luxury brands inside there. And they loved the idea of having an iOS application. And we said, why not? We can build that. And just like all the, like, shops inside there, how to navigate, where did you park your car, a few nice use cases. And they asked for an Android application of the same one. Then they went ahead and asked us, can we have like some digital signature kiosks inside the mall so people without the phones— back then, 16 years ago, people just loved large screens also. Mm-hmm. And then they got the software for that and they went behind and they asked us, can you supply the hardware also? And it was our first time that like hardware, no, we can't, but we can find you the right vendors. No, we want from you. And like, it was around like one of them was around $3,000 or so. One shopping mall buys like 30, 40 of them. And they said like triple the price, give it, we just want one vendor.

Mm-hmm.

So in just 6 months it was like amazing boom and I was still interested in just Amazon AWS and it was a perfect time just like selling my shares and then the company acquired. So that was the wildest ride. Hopefully soon we will have a similar product market fit for Reachify too.

And your second one, you also got acquired. Not sure if there's a pattern here, but Minder Software Solution and I, Saw a keyword that activates my brain, which is brain-computer interface, BCI. Tell me a bit more about that one.

Thank you so much. Yeah, that one, minder, is like, I did my PhD in cognitive science during while I was building that company also. I was always awestruck by just if you can understand what people are thinking or just is there an output of when we think about something. And like, it was a little philosophical, it was a little, sometimes religious, et cetera. And all those things just got me to like the idea of brainwaves getting out as an output and can we recognize the patterns through a device. And then I just like, uh, was exposed to some devices. Like there was Emotiv back then, I guess still there on the market, a few others. And Emotiv was the most robust one that we could collect, uh, easily, a commercial one. Mm-hmm. People's brainwaves. That was a loss of data for sure, but it was enough to understand how people are emotionally, just are they engaged, are they just like a little angry. There are some patterns already in the academic papers. So what we did was just actually neuromarketing. You know, TV advertisements are just like quite expensive. It was way more expensive back then. There was more or less no Facebook. Google was there, but Google Ads wasn't that huge. And so just like there are lots of big advertising agencies working for large conglomerates, preparing their TV advertisements. What we were doing, mostly they are doing like 3 minutes, 5 minutes long versions, but since TV advertisements are quite expensive, they needed 30 seconds, 20 seconds. Yeah. And what we were doing is letting people watch their TV advertisements before they go live and letting them know which seconds are the best to put into the cut version. And we were working closely with the worldwide user research company Ipsos, maybe you have heard of it. So through that partnership, it was quite a success then.

Then you went like on a corporate streak, right? So— Yeah. AWS, eBay, Udemy, all amazing companies, right? But what happened then? Did you, were you like burned out of the founder life? Uh-huh.

I would say actually the idea was like, I wanted to see how to scale things that big, like AWS, how teams, like we did some stuff like, okay, sold the companies, but like doing that at like Amazon scale, how does it work? I was so curious about that. And I was just like, the easiest way to get in was just like my talent in engineering. So I just got an offer fast in AWS in Palo Alto.

Yeah.

I learned a lot about like the engineering excellence, the customer obsession. So a lot of details and like Amazon, 2 years feels like 5 years, 6 years. You work like crazy, but enjoy it like, crazy. So also seeing the Bay Area cultures, I was curious about California since my high school. I, I was a swimmer, so I was swimming for like, uh, the high school team. I was the captain of it. So always you see the surfing people. So I just wanted to merge all my, uh, curiosities together. And then most probably I was thinking maybe another startup in Silicon Valley would be awesome right after spending a few years. But like the emotional side, like my brain perfectly fits there, but my heart was in this area, Europe, Istanbul. So I just didn't want it to be my fate. So that's why I wanted to come back and eBay had an amazing offer with just all half billion dollars GMV business.

Wow.

Managing all product engineering, it was another experience. And then actually I had a startup, I had my son. So he's now, he's now 9, so I can go back to my startup life. It's a perfect success that like he's, uh, like making money on his own, 9 years old. So I can get back to the next. That's, that was the story short.

And is there a reason why you decided to stay in Turkey? Is it like you're having your son, or is it you just prefer it to Silicon Valley, which is like more on the stress side of things? Is it like visa? Because for example, I'm in Mexico, right? I go to the Valley and Austin precisely a couple times a year, but I'm still not convinced if I should step in the eye of the hurricane, right? Like for, longevity purposes and energy efficiency purposes, and also for differentiation purposes. I think I have an edge not being in there all the time. So is there something to that on your side?

I would say so. Just like, as I said, like 2 years there, I mean, intellectually, like, my IQ levels get higher because, like, whole Silicon Valley IQ levels, I just respect all of them. But emotional quality, I would say just like needs some attention. Like I, uh, not maybe for all, but like some individualistic culture, quite just focused on themselves. And like, I wouldn't say workaholic, but like there are other sides, other things, uh, that should fit in a lifetime. So that, like, I guess that's why I— we considered New York. My sister lives there 26 years. And then Europe, I love. I lived in Italy 2 years, spent some time in Germany. But I guess Istanbul— what's interesting about Istanbul is like, it's a very highly cosmopolitan, all cultures all together, and you can find anything just like here. And it's quite a hub. Mm-hmm. And like very strong connections here. So that's the idea and friends, family. And for, as you mentioned, for longevity, I guess like there are lots of experiments, papers around those. One of the most important things after sleep, exercise, and eating well is your community, is your connections, bonding with people. And I believe Istanbul is the right place for me. Okay.

Interesting. Tell me about the current state of the company Richify. Why did you decide to start that one? It's been 8 months, right? So have you seen growth?

Yep, uh, totally. Quick numbers: we are over 35,000 downloads with very minimal, just like, marketing spend. Uh, it's just like we are building, uh, the product. So just like almost mature that like we may just go ahead more GTM. We just wanted to learn if the world needed this and what they needed actually. So over like almost 10,000 registered users, we had 200,000+ AI agent interactions and we played with the product along the way, just onboarding changed, the agents changed, localized a lot. Yeah. And so overall, people uploaded more than $700 million of assets. So the idea is just like actually in order to what I learned through my 5 years at Udemy, just like we want to increase, you want to increase people's financial literacy, education levels. That's all good. But if they don't actually learn on their own problems, so that like you can teach a person who is just buried in debt just, do you know how you can retire? He, he, there are different strategies about retirement. They don't care at all. So that's like, that's why we put the some parts like you can upload your assets, liabilities, and like cash flow so that you can talk with AI over those to get different perspectives and optimize the lot. So that's why I said, I guess we are getting more traction and Recently Udemy CFO, ex-CFO Sarah was an advisor already. I will just like tell you about how a personal finance and a very successful company's finance department is like, has some similar things there. So we got like small investments as just like they spend a lot of time thinking about Reachify also. Currently I would like to increase the traction a little more in a few months and like maybe we can do a round there. Before that, like what I've seen at Amazon, eBay, and like Udemy, I was managing payments team a lot. That's why I've worked very closely with finance teams. And like, you know, every quarter any public company in US goes and tells like publicly about— there's the earnings call, earnings report there. And like you put your assets, liabilities, how was the cash flow, and there is the forward-looking. There's always right strategies and right actually practices that can be applied to personal finance. And like the money, like the wealth people have who has investable assets from $100,000 to $5 million, it's $300 trillion. Half of whole world's wealth is in the hands of these people, which I don't think are that rational, including me, about their finances because financial education is so low. Yeah. We should have learned many things in primary school or so. Before, like, AI, I would say it was always like Googling stuff, asking friends. But now with LLMs, I guess there are great ways to serve this data to people so that they, they're better positioned for their financial well-being. So they, they're informed because accessing information is also not straightforward there. So that's the idea. And like, we are— people are learning a lot, understanding more worldwide, I would say.

There's so many of these apps though. I had one of the, um, on the show yesterday on Shark Tank, right? So why do you feel that category is ripe for product-market fit and exponential growth if I would have to invest in you?

I would say just like, because the holistic way is critical. I mean, there are many apps that talks about just your paying your debts, just concentrated how your assets are, stocks are doing. Just some of them are just caring about mortgages. One of them is retirement, but financial world is holistic. Can you think of a company, public company who is only caring about their accounting but doesn't have an FP&A? Who is not perfect about like putting financial goals for the company, like based on actual results. That's why I would say in order to understand any, just like any tree, you need to understand the forest. That's why I would say it's a harder, more challenging problem, but ultimately it should get to the whole pictures in all the details. And with AI, I believe it's possible.

Yeah.

And I guess the next thing in my mind is like these AI agents, general AI, general LLMs is not enough for personal finance. We will need AI agents backed by humans, maintained with the recent data, with the local data. Think about you, you wanna buy a house in Amsterdam, for example, so that like general LLMs will give you some data, will collect some information from the web. Well, like there's some great local data in real estate agents locally in Amsterdam that you would like to access and we would love to welcome them on the platform. We have a few cases, they manage their own agents, managing their own agents, meaning what are the MCPs they should be connecting? What are the attention layer or the knowledge base? Such an AI agent focused on Amsterdam real estate is totally different from a general LLM responding to you and understanding to you. So like as how Clouda does anything is like leveraging subagents. So think about an AI CFO that's serving you that can leverage hundreds of subagents managed by hundreds of real estate agents like tax agents, local tax regulations, et cetera, would get you a better answer.

You are fundraising soon for this one. So what's the next big thing for you? What are your next priorities?

I would say just like we would like to go ahead and defining detailed journeys for Localized. We went general and now we want to focus on like US, Australia, because we have seen the most traction. There. And then just like onboarding, uh, like real estate agents and local, uh, tax advisor agents managed by humans on the marketplace. And thinking of like spending more on go-to-market strategies and partnerships, local partnerships with like Australian financial institutions, maybe just like, uh, to go to market together.

Interesting. Um, financial education, right? Like, for kids, do you think they should teach it at school? If so, how so? Why do you think financial education is not, uh, in our, uh, basic deck, in our basic stack, when he— when we start out in life?

Yep, Charles, the— this was a crazy time when I learned about an OECD report that like there was a survey questionnaire for people for just like, they use hundreds of people, ask them questions about basic financial literacy stuff. It was what's inflation? Like with an example, what's compound compounding? And the other one was diversification. And like 70% of them got scores less than 70. So that like when you think about personal finance, so everybody thinks about like picking the next best stock or just like, uh, whatever, beating the markets, or I don't know, something like a dream. But finances is actual numbers and it's actually maths that can be coded by an AI. So if you have some, uh, scenarios in mind, AI can go ahead and get you an answer, calculated, coded answer in just a few seconds. Before, people were using spreadsheets, and not everybody is perfect in spreadsheets. So what I would say is like for my son, I'm trying to teach him what are currencies, why inflation is here, why inflation is higher in Turkey than US, why inflation was higher in US during pandemic, etc. And then what's money actually like? And then what's assets? People are coming and asking about what's an asset, what's a liability, and how they may change their decisions in the future. After health, I guess one of the most important things people care about is their wealth and how to build that. There are lots of books there, but like we should have learned them. You don't need to read a 200-page book to understand Warren Buffett's strategy about long-term investing or how actually central banks are working or what Ray Dalio thinks about like the future, etc. So That's what I'm thinking. Financial education starts with like, what's finance, what's money, what are currencies, how it does work, who just like increases the supply of money, how does it work and how you can just like think about investing long-term, short-term and how you manage your money. Because there are lots of like stages in personal finance. You start with paying debt. We see lots of people in debt spiral. Then you get to paycheck to paycheck, then you start to save and understand how I can invest. Mostly it's new homeowners, then people become new parents, and then they go ahead and like how to just become a better investor. Then retirement comes. And coming to your discussion about longevity, one of the most, uh, just like tapped push notification of Richify is what if you live to 100? Would that money you saved for retirement, or you think you just like was enough, uh, would be enough like if you go get to 100? Is like also people just like needs better plans.

Isn't it the first step to start a business though? Like before investing, I don't think make any sense for someone talk about investing when they haven't even started a business and understood the fundamentals, right?

Fully agreed. Just like one of the best quotes I've ever heard from the Valley was, if you haven't started up your company before you were 25, you failed already. So they were saying, but not everybody has the chance with that, but fully agreed. The first chance people get, people should be just like become entrepreneurs. ASAP. And I guess with AI revolution, things got easier to build something, to taste it on the market, etc. And that's what I think for the future of my son also. People, if they will go to university, they don't have to, I believe, but if they should choose something, it should be entrepreneurship.

I love that. Uh, well, thanks for being on today, Kagri. Where can, uh, people find out more about you?

Yeah, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter time to time, but just like, uh, Charles at Reachify at, uh, .ai. Uh, LinkedIn must be the easiest way, but most of the time I'm online. They should, they should be able to find me.