How to Propel the Fight Against Poverty in America

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This week on the Andrew Yang.

Podcast, the American safety net is about to be tested and about to become even more important than it ever has been. The safety net is kind of two parts. It's the funding, like the money behind it, which is controlled by policy. And that's what all the headlines generally tend to be about. And it's administration. We want to be the tech company that modernizes administration of the safety net, that makes it so that the user experience of navigating any safety net program feels on par with navigating any modern consumer software app, like ordering on DoorDash or getting an Uber, right?

It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast one of the great unsung heroes of business, the founder and CEO of Propel, which we'll hear about.

Jimmy Chen, thank you so much for having me, Andrew.

You kidding, Jimmy? Thanks for taking the time from alleviating poverty. And some people here think that I want to want to alleviate poverty, which I totally do. I've run around trying to do so and occasionally having some achievements. But you've been doing the real thing now for a number of years and I can't wait for people to hear about it. People can look at us and think, oh, these two guys seem like they have a lot in common. I don't know if people think that. I have no idea. But did you grow up what part of the U.S. did you grow up in? Or did you come over as an immigrant?

Came over as an immigrant from China when I was 4 years old. My parents and I settled in Kansas City, so that's where I grew up and spent most of my childhood.

So Kansas City, you grew up all. I mean I have actually been to Kansas City and it's a perfectly pleasant, fun environment. Does this make you a Chiefs fan?

Yeah, yeah, I think it made me a lifelong Kansas City sports fan of all types.

Okay, so then you come of age in Kansas City. You were, I'm going to just, you know, ruin some things for people. But I'm sure you were the smart kid in high school because you end up going out west to Stanford for school.

Yeah, that's right. And I had a. I had a fantastic childhood in Kansas City. Really loved it there and had a great household that I grew up in with my parents. I think similar to a lot of immigrants. We came to the United States without a lot of resources, without a lot of money, without knowing anybody. And so parents kind of worked their way up from starting off, like working in restaurants, my dad worked in the construction industry, stuff like that. And so had again, had a happy childhood, but one where money was just always tight. And so.

Yeah, so that's very different than my sitch because my parents met as graduate students at Berkeley and so then my dad was a lab geek, my mom worked for a university. Your family, it sounds like, was much more hard pressed. Why did they choose Kansas City?

Coincidentally, kind of. My dad's grad school had an exchange program with the University of Missouri, Kansas City. And so they were looking for a place to live in America outside of China at the time. And that's where we landed.

All right, so you actually did have some experience with financial deprivation. My case, I will say that most of the deprivation I got was psychic and emotional. Love you, mom. But. But in your case you actually had some direct experience. You got to Stanford, which I'm going to say is a very abundant environment.

Totally.

You wind up working at some name brand tech companies, but then you decide to try and build Propel as a company that's going to try to address poverty.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was. To me, Propel was sort of the culmination, or not the culmination, but the combination of the different kind of things that I had seen in my personal life. Right. Growing up in a household where we had some financial needs, going to Stanford on a full financial needs scholarship and then after Stanford getting jobs in consumer technology. I mean, I think like many people at Stanford, I got really into technology, was entranced by this idea of like writing code, building websites and apps, like cool thing in Silicon Valley happening at the time. I landed at a few different tech companies out of college, you know, big social networks as they were scaling up Got to go through Several of the IPOs of Silicon Valley and just learned a lot from a lot of smart people. And one of the things that I learned from, from those people is that there's kind of a conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is to solve the problems that you personally experience. And I think that makes a ton of sense if you're trying to start know a ride sharing company or an online dating company, or even a B2B play that like solves some kind of business need that you're. You as a, as a business person have personally experienced. But one of the things I kept thinking about, especially later in my time in the Valley was, hey, there are people who are using technology and using the Internet very natively, but who may not have the means or the, the network to build the technology for their own needs. And so the Internet was becoming more and more useful for people who are like me, people who knew how to code, who lived in San Francisco, who worked in the tech industry. And it was not becoming very useful for people like my parents as I was growing up, who grew up in, you know, we were living in the middle of the country and we didn't have a lot of money. And you know, for those very different types of needs, they're almost like two different Internets, right, of people who are building the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world versus people who are just trying to make it by on a day to day basis.

Oh, this is a critique a lot of us have heard. It's like, hey, you're going. Guys are solving first world problems. You know, you want that speedy food delivery in your San Francisco flat. Like, you know, we've now got several competing apps for that, but do we have anyone trying to make it so you can access your government benefits in a way that makes sense? Which is the idea for Propel. So when did you start getting that idea and when did you decide to actually take the leap and start the company?

So I left my job at Facebook in 2014 to move out to Brooklyn to do a fellowship at a nonprofit called Blue Ridge Labs.

Oh my gosh. I know those guys. You do? Yeah.

I mean there, it's a key part of my story. You know, I didn't know what I wanted to build. I knew I wanted to do something around these theories, but I didn't know what specifically was going to turn into landed at Blue Ridge Labs. It's a, it's a fellowship program that takes aspiring entrepreneurs and gives them a summer to do user research, which is a fancy Word for just talking to people so that they can identify and prototype new solutions that make some impact on poverty. So we're building software for low income Americans and doing it through just talking to people a lot, trying stuff, putting software in people's hands and seeing what works and what doesn't.

I just want to press on this for a second. So this is like a fairly dramatic professional juncture because you are in Silicon Valley, part of these megacorps making a lot of money, getting various stock options. The way they stage it is like you stay longer, you get more and then you unplugged and said, you know what, I'm going to go do this fellowship program in Brooklyn that I'm sure was not super lucrative at all. It's like I'm going to do years of research on a problem for the poor. And I want to press on this because one of the ethos behind Silicon Valley is to build things that are going to improve the world. But very, very few people make the decision that you did. I mean, were there people around you like, yo, like what's that about? Or did you have. I mean it sounds like your parents might have been down, but maybe they weren't down. They were.

No. And it is like recogniz prioritizing that as an unconventional path for an Asian person to take in America. And with parents who definitely had kind of the traditional mindset around, like, have stability in your career, prioritize financial resources first. Right. And you know, I'm incredibly fortunate that in my time in the tech industry was able to make enough personal saving. It was definitely not a ton of money but enough personal savings that my parents were like not worried about me not having a roof over my head when I was starting my own company. And you know, the way I thought about it at the time was like, hey, this is something that I really believe in. And yes, it's a big risk, but when better is it going to be for me to take a risk? Right. At the time I was 26 years old, like didn't have kids or a partner. It was just sort of dude.

Yeah. That's what I said when I started a company when I was 25. It's like I don't have anything timing now. Why am I acting like I have all these obligations? I don't even have a girlfriend.

Right.

Did you have a girlfriend?

I did have a girlfriend at the time who I broke up with to move out here to start the company.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

Anyway. And now People should know, fast forward again that you're now happily married with a second child on the way, living in Brooklyn. So see, everything worked out. So you're 26 and you start talking to people about how the Internet could be improved for them. So what did you find out?

Well, I just learned a ton about how people spent their days and started to, like, just, you know, the way that I sort of approach those conversations was just trying to be curious and to poke at things that I didn't, I felt like I didn't fully understand or that I didn't have personal experience with. And one of the things that I heard time and again was the amount of time and energy people spent navigating the social safety net.

Yeah, yeah, man.

And it struck me that like, that's one of the things that is different between, like, how a low income family might spend their time versus a medium or high income family. Just like by definition, the social safety net in the United States is generally available to people who are lower income, but not to people that are middle or high income. And so people talk about, you know, the common complaint is like, hey, the dmv, like, sucks to stand in line and use the website and things like that. But people of all economic spectrums have to use the dmv, right? Only people that are low income know what it's like to apply for the food stamp program or to navigate Medicaid. And it struck me that this is like a whole category of user experiences in software that are pretty invisible to the people who work in tech because they've never had to, by and large. They haven't had to experience them themselves. But it also seemed like an incredibly important part of the Internet, right? Like the software that you use tens.

Of millions of people every day to.

Put food on the table for yourself or to get health care, to get housing. That seems like some of the most important software on the Internet, like, really needs to work. Really. And so that led me down the path of like, let me let, like, let me try it myself. Let me go apply for food stamp benefits myself. Let me like.

And I'm sure you found it was a breeze and nothing to see here, and you're like, oh, no problem to be solved.

Yeah, not quite, unfortunately.

Unfortunately. That was a nightmare.

Yeah, that's right. And, and I think, but like, it's not that it was just a nightmare. It was like, it was a nightmare that gave me some optimism, right? Because a lot of the things that could be solved were just like very practical issues that were in Tech, we would call them solved problems. You don't have to invent some new AI frontier model to solve these things. It's like we just need to make this website work on a smartphone or we just need to reduce the number of fields on this form and make it so that the button is clickable by you. Things like in a very basic sense, the types of things that I learned in college around user experience design and how to design around the needs of individuals. That was sort of the premise for Propel. We build a technology company whose DNA was truly a technology company that hired people who had worked at other major consumer tech companies and had kind of that tech skill set, but who really, really wanted to apply that skill set to the specific needs of low income people who navigate the safety net.

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Totally. In the 10 plus years of running Propel, we spent a lot of time talking to public servants at the state level, at the federal level, at the local level, who run a lot of these safety net program. It's really, God bless them, right? Because of the work that they've done. And by and large, like, you know, there's not a ton of like deep ideology. There's not a ton of like, we're trying to make this complicated to keep whatever. It's not like the kind of stuff was here in the ten years ago. And like, it's just people trying to make the system work to serve other people. And by and large our experience has been, you know, I don't doubt that there are some people that are intentionally trying to make things complicated, but there's a huge chunk of this that is not intentional. There's a huge chunk of this that's like, well, it's a big machine. It's like hundreds of billions of dollars across 50 states with programs and complicated rules. And we're just trying to follow the rules, get the money to the people who need them and not to the people who don't.

And what's the total number of Americans that this describes?

Yeah, well, to talk just about the food stamp program, 42 million Americans in 22 million households. The 42 million includes children and families and so on. So we're talking about roughly one in eight people in the United States is currently receiving SNAP benefits, which is more commonly known as food stamps. They get their benefits on an EBT card, which is this debit card that kind of looks like any other credit or debit card that you might receive. But as an example, the kind of like mundane detail that, that was just kind of a software problem. When we talk to people with EBT cards, one of the things we learned is that most people check their EBT balance by calling this 1-800number on the back of the card. And so you know, being a techie, being kind of naive about it, I was like, well, why isn't there a mobile banking app for the EBT card? That's how I would check my balance on my, ye know, bank balance or my credit card.

It might not be that easy for you to call this number depending upon like, you know, if you were working a shift or whatnot.

Yeah, totally. I mean it's, it's just, it's not the, it's not the modern way to do it.

It's a small friction but like, I.

Mean one of the things we started thinking about was this is the, the lived experience of America's safety net. It's, it's like a death by a thousand cuts. Like everything is a little bit more annoying than it should be. Yeah, the things load a little slower. It's like you have to call this number instead of using a modern app. It's like each of the individual details might not feel like the thing that is like causing poverty in this country or anything like that, but I think in the aggregate when you think about these thousand cuts, like every little inconvenience, it's the kind of stuff that I think really does like have an added impact on low income families. It creates mental load, makes it just another thing you have to think and worry about.

So for that one, did you actually make it so an app can tell them their balance?

That's right. So that, that's what we built. The Propel app is a free app used by more than 5 million families across the country each month who have food stamp or SNAP benefits on EBT cards. And it replaces that1,800 number with what was, you know, the country's first mobile banking app for the EBT card. It just shows you your balance and transaction history.

Wow, that'd be a big deal. Even just so you could monitor your spending and like see what's going on, like do all these modern things. So how did you get the information from the government as to how much is on everyone's card?

Yeah, so in researching how to build this product in the first place, one of the things we learned is that every state contracts with a private, private company called an EBT processor who's required to build these, these essentially these websites where any cardholder can log in and see their balance and transaction history. We also learned that in financial services there's been a big trend towards open banking and financial data access, which is the ability to, for example, tell the Venmo app that they have permission to pull, to pull Money from my bank of America account. Right. And in financial services, there's kind of rules around this and there's kind of standards that allow apps like Venmo to pull money from your other accounts. And so what we thought about was, why doesn't that apply to, to this thing? This is a, it's a financial service tool. The EBT card is a, is a payment tool. It's the largest form of debit in the United States. Just by transaction volume. It's $100 billion in payments each year. And if we applied that same concept of give consumers the right to access their own data, so a consumer can say, hey, I want you to take my information from this web portal and show it to me in the Propel app. That's what we do. So we facilitate that access. We get consent from the consumer to access their, their information on that portal and then show it to them in the Propel app instead.

Okay. So people listening to this are thinking, that is dope, that all these people can now see their information in a modern way. But that doesn't seem like, like a game changer in terms of value add. I mean, it's definitely, you know, like, helpful. But what you've done with Propel is you've actually tried to address different needs where today there are even people doing things like finding jobs and achieving various financial goals via Propel.

Yeah, yeah. I think of EBT balance and the need to check your balance as the hook. It's the reason why people download the app.

That makes sense. It's like, oh, I'm going to definitely download this app so I could see my balance.

Well, it's. It is probably the most common interaction that Americans who use the safety net have with the safety net is checking their ebt.

That makes total sense.

Right? It's more frequent than anything you would do at Medicaid. It's more frequent than anything you do in Social Security. It is a, you know, multiple times a week action, because that's how often people buy food and think about how much money they have left for food. And so, you know, by building something that allows us to get that kind of recurring interaction to become the kind of nexus by which people have this most common interaction with the American safety net. It gives us this opportunity to build trust and to give people a chance to access a lot of other services. So to your point, the Propel app doesn't just help you check your balance. We also help people to apply for jobs. So more than 3 million people have now applied for a Job. Through propel, we helped 700,000 people submit applications last year. We help people save money on their bills and on groceries. We help people save over $100 million on groceries and bills last year.

Wow.

We help people navigate various other government benefits, find out what else they qualify for, navigate things like Medicare and Medicaid, understand what's changing with the, with how government benefits are. You know, they're always changing. There's always new benefits, always changes to the, to the rules. And one of the biggest challenges for people is like figuring out what's going to happen to them so they can plan around. So that's a lot of what we build as well.

Yeah. So you guys are obviously apolitical, but there's a lot of talk right now about this mega bill that is going to curtail benefits for some. It's certainly going to impact Medicare and Medicaid for some. When you see this kind of thing coming down the pike, what do you and your team do?

Well, I mean, the first thing that we do is just think about how people who use our app are going to be affected and to brainstorm what we could do to help them through that situation. Now, we are not a government entity, so we don't control funding for the programs or the rules of the programs, but we can help people navigate what's going on with the rules. We can help people make decisions that are in their own financial self interest. We can help people do things like fill out forms or navigate complex processes. Right. Once those forms and processes become available, I think, like broadly the way I think about the food stamp program and its funding level and what that really means is to go back to first principles, which is that, you know, the reason the program exists is this is sort of a belief in this prosperous country, nobody ought to be hungry. Right. And so what we've established is a food stamp program is essentially roughly $3 per meal per person who qualifies for it. What we're doing is giving someone $3 to pay for each meal. And that $3 actually scales down if your income or your assets are higher. So if you have more money, the government gives you less than $3 per meal. But it's saying if you have no income at all, we think you should have $3 to pay for a meal. That's like kind of the bare bones.

That seems like a meal. Yeah, right.

And it's, it's, it's not a super generous amount. Right. It's it. That just is the reality. And so when we talk about slashing Benefit amounts. What we're really saying is, okay, maybe it shouldn't be $3, it should be 250 or $2 or $1. Right? And so I mean that, that to me is like, like puts it in context and helps, helps me think about and helps our team think about what it means for the real people that get the benefit. It's like, okay, now you're going to tell them that rather than the $3 per meal, they're gonna have to make do with $2.50 or $2.

So you moved to Brooklyn for Blue ridges Fellowship in 2014. Fast forward to today. How many employees does Propel have?

We? About 100.

About 100. And your mega anti poverty app. You guys can see why I love Jimmy's story so much and Propel so much. So you touch 5 million users every, I'm gonna say every day. Probably every day. I mean, people probably do interact with.

A million people every day and about 4 million people each week.

That's what I'm talking about. All right, 2 million people a day, 4 million a week. Your addressable market, just from food stamps, it sounds like, is 22 million households, of which you're reaching about 5 million. So job one, which is happening organically anyway, but you know, is okay, let's try and get that number up. So if anyone here is listening and thinks you know someone on food stamps who would benefit from signing up for Propel, please let them know. It could be you yourself, it could be someone in your community. But Propel is free, right? And as you can tell, it's just value add and it's going to try and get you the benefits that you're entitled to, help you navigate the bureaucracy, help you accomplish various other goals. What, what has this last decade plus been like for you building this? Because you'd have to go to investors years ago and say, hey guys, here's a deal. We think that there's a massive opportunity in helping tens of millions of less well off Americans get better access to benefits. How did people react from the investor class? Was that you going back to Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley and doing like the entire pitch meeting thing that people have seen on a lot of.

Blank looks, a lot of blank looks. And I think, you know, I sort of went into it not, I'd never worked at a startup, I'd never raised money for a startup, didn't, didn't really know what I was doing and so had had a number of those meetings just kind of out of the, out of, you know, what you would expect in pitching investors in Sand Hill Road or in other places. And, and I think the thing that struck me the most is that like, a lot of investors invest based on their own personal experiences.

And they didn't, they didn't live this one.

And if they haven't lived this one and most people haven't, it made it really hard for them to connect to it. And it wasn't always a malicious thing or like a, like, like there was one investor in particular who turned me down, who gave me really good feedback that stuck in my head because I think it was very honest. And he said, look, what you're pitching me, like, makes a ton of sense on paper. I see your numbers are good, but like, you know, I just can't reach the level of personal conviction to invest a bunch of my money into this thing because I've never experienced it myself. It's all kind of theoretical. Yeah, I've like, read a New York Times article about the food stamp program or whatever, but it's like, it's not personal. And so it's very hard for me to reach the level of conviction needed to invest. And I think that's, that's fair. But it also, like, created a big uphill road for us.

Question was that person investing their own money or are they investing?

Like, that was a small fund, so it was an L. It was a person who was investing partly his own money, but also a small fund.

Because I got to say, if you were investing someone else's money, it's like even legitimate for them to say, look, like, I just can't do this with conviction because I'm entrusted with someone else's money. If it was their money, then it's a little bit less cool. So you got an honest response like that, which is sort of unusual and it being very forthright. But then you eventually found the right investors.

It was a combination of finding the right investors. And we're super fortunate to have investors who do understand both the user experience, the mission of the company, and the business opportunity of the company. And also we just grew more. I struck out a lot in the early days trying to fundraise and trying to pitch that we were a for profit food stamp software company that would build a free app and someday make a billion dollars. Right. That's like the unicorn Silicon Valley tech dream. And I think I came to realize how like, extreme that sounded to a lot of people. I think for us, what changed was first, to your point, finding investors who did understand this. So it wasn't Always people who had personally been on food stamps themselves or anything like that. But it was often people who had, like, in their past lives built a business that served a similar demographic. Or, you know, Hans Morris from Nika, who's one of our board members now, was the CFO of Citigroup when they ran an EBT processing business. And so he actually understood the EBT industry and the economics behind it, the size of the program, the importance of it from a business standpoint. So these are the kind of experiences that gave him a special kind of insight into why our business was interesting. I think the other part of it for us was, frankly, we just grew a lot, you know, at that, you know, we had, at the time we were sitting in free office space in Blue Ridge Labs was a team of five people who hadn't really raised any money. And we had something like 300,000 people using our app each month. Month.

Wow.

From just gorilla word of mouth, marketing. And so I think we turned some heads and people were like, whoa, whoa. This app has like basically no investors and they're just kind of making it on a shoestring budget. But it seems like a bunch of people want to use it. And so, you know, that was, that was, that was really helpful and kind of us being able to say, no, no, it's not just a wild theory that we can build a company that serves millions of people. But, like, we're starting to do it, we can prove it. Foreign.

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Foreign.

Wow, that. That's really uplifting that you managed to get proof of concept in that way. How did you get those first few hundred thousand users?

All sorts of different ways. We did a lot of like, in person stuff, like flyering at food stamp offices or in grocery stores. One of the things I did is I. I had previously worked at Facebook, and at least back then, at Facebook, every employee gets A$250 per month to run ads, to, like, test the ad system. And so I called up a bunch of my friends who still worked at Facebook and said, hey, could you use your credit to promote the Propel app? And so that was how we got like thousands of ads.

Didn't have to be a real jerk to say no.

Well, I'm fortunate that they said yes. And I think for us, a big.

Part of it, because they get like a free credit. What am I using it for?

Yeah, yeah, that's great. After that, a big part of it was just word of mouth. Right.

What we found is as soon as people caught on, once we got it.

Going, once we got a few thousand people, they started telling other people about it and it started to grow by itself.

Yeah, the first few thousand. Tricky one. I love that story of you calling your old buddies at Facebook because, you know, it's. It's scrappy and resourceful. So you grow, get some money in, grow some more. You've reached now this point where you're serving millions of people. How much of you gets really frustrated looking at the fact that food stamps alone, you've got another 17 million households you could be touching. And then you level up from that and be like, oh, my gosh, I now am quasi expert in the healthcare system, Medicare, Medicaid, the entire labyrinth of crazy programs. And it reminds me of this book I read by Jen Palka. Recoding. Absolutely.

She's fantastic.

Yeah, she is fantastic. And so she was the deputy CTO of the US and was trying to make things better. And she concluded like, yo, this stuff's really not. And she doesn't blame the people who are in the system. It's like, you know, they just have this crazy set of rules and they wake up and they, you know, it's like, no one wants to do anything illegal. But she clearly, you know, had a lot of frustration. In your case, you've done more for the poor than just about any human I can identify genuinely. And you deserve so much credit for it. I mean, you. You just did something that, you know, spoke to your values, and there's so much being, you know, invested in or being built. Like you took something very, very direct and impactful and said, look, hey there, there are these millions of people that would benefit from this. But I feel like the opportunity is enormous and you're just scratching the surface.

Absolutely. And I mean truly, thank you for that. That's, it's very kind words and it's kind of like very much in the spirit of what we set out to do 11 years ago. And so, you know, does feel great to have been able to make an impact so far. But to your point, it really feels like we're just scratching the surface that we've like, we've improved like one aspect of just the food stamp program really. I think the opportunity is thinking about the safety net as a whole in the United States and sort of it comes from a starting point for me that like the American safety net is about to be tested and about to become even more important than it ever has been. As we think about economic instability, you know, whether it's from tariffs or trade or any number of other things.

Or AI.

Or AI. Right. When we think about changes to the employment markets and how people think about their jobs and careers in America, we have a taxpayer funded safety net that is in intended to help people from going hungry, from not having health care, from not having a roof over their heads. And I think the safety net is kind of two parts. It's the funding like the money behind it, which is controlled by policy. And that's what all the headlines generally tend to be about. And it's administration.

Yeah. Which is totally overlooked.

And so that's what we are trying to do as a company. Like we want to be the tech company that modernizes administration of the safety net, that makes it so that the user experience of navigating any safety net program feels on par with navigating any model modern consumer software app, like ordering on Doordash or getting an Uber. Right.

It really is the problem. And so we've had a number of people on the podcast like Jen Palka, but folks who have run aground in the bureaucracy. It's now this buzzy topic because of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and abundance being like, yo, yo. Like the reason why we can't build is because you have these confining rules and regulations and if you want abundance, you should really be trying to clear a lot of the stuff out. And then now there's this soul searching. But so much of the problem is in the administration and the press ignores it. The people who live it are unfortunately almost entirely absent from the conversation because they're typically in the bottom 50%. One of the most painful experiences I had in and that light was when the enhanced child tax credit got taken away at the beginning of 22 and you saw child poverty go from 5% to 11%. It was 11% and then went down to 5%.

Yeah. For six months during those monthly payments, we saw what it could have been.

Right, we saw what it could have been. It was so obvious and like 130 economists said, hey, this is the best anti poverty thing we've ever done and we should keep doing it.

Right.

And then of course, because of our dysfunctional politics, we undid it. And I remember that first missed payment date, which was I believe January 15, 2022 is when they, you know, had been getting these monthly checks and then they stopped getting these monthly checks. And then you wait to see is there going to be any protest outcry, folks showing up at their members offices being like, yo, what happened to that money? And there was nothing. Because the people who are in the bottom 30, 40% of the population don't have the awareness, bandwidth, ability to identify what the proper place to go or a person to call would even be. They just get the rug pulled out under them. And you probably had a real time dashboard with all these families.

We saw a lot of data coming in about how food insecurity was increasing and worsening during that time period directly as a result of those payment stoppages. It was money that people started to rely on that started to make a really big difference for people across the spectrum. And so when you look at metrics around how much debt people carried, how they were like thinking about housing, like percentage of families that were housing unstable, percentage of families that were skipping meals, all those bad metrics spiked starting in that January as a pretty direct result of the child tax credit payment stopping. But I mean to your point about like low income Americans, this is actually one of the things that I am, I am really excited about and hope we could build Propel into someday this idea that like could we organize low income Americans as a voting bloc. The model that I look at for this is actually the AARP and what they've been able to do for seniors.

Yeah, right.

That like, you know, it's a nonprofit. It's very different from Propel as a technology company that does consumer stuff. But I think AARP has done an incredible job of like solidifying seniors as a political constituency.

Sure. No one wants to mess with them and they all vote.

And there's no organization doing that for low income Americans. Right. And I think that's a huge opportunity. I think it's like it's something that for us is something that we'd love to build ourselves into. Right. If we can continue to grow as a company, we'd love to be the AARP for low income people that like aggregates their needs, advocates for them, allows them to advocate for themselves and just like makes more obvious like when we're talking about things that dramatically impact the lives of low income Americans. They have a voice in democracy just like anyone else. Hey, I'm Mark Ronson. And I'm ray. To celebrate 150 years of Audemars Piguet, we've teamed up to create something timeless. A tribute to legacy, rhythm and craft with a very special connection at its heart. A soundscape from two cities, two places, perspectives and one shared vision. Introducing our brand new song, Suzanne@blinds.com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

Wow. So check it out Jimmy. You are in position to live so many people's dream. Where is this tempting ever for you to be like, you know what I can get in front of 5 million people this week. I'm just going to show up, be like, hey, I'm Jimmy at Zero Propel. You could be everyone's friend via Propel. Do you ever, are you ever tempted to do that?

Not as much. I mean I am a little shyer by nature so I'm not trying to do that for myself. I mean, I think for us obviously it's like we got to take very seriously the fact that we do have this opportunity and the trust of 5 million people who frankly don't trust a lot of service services. Right. Low income people get screwed every industry left and right. And so it means a lot to us to be really careful and to retain their trust. Which again, I think that, I think there's no secret like magic recipe to get trust for low income people. It's really just like showing up every Day and fulfilling your promises day in and day out.

It's like my long term thing. My shit works today, my shit will work tomorrow.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. If I tell you it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. And like I'm gonna do stuff that's like, like that is, that's going to help you out. I'm just going to keep doing it, dude.

The trust rate for Propel users of propel is probably 10 times higher than their trust rate of just about everything else.

Well, you know, here's another thing that I'm excited about and you kind of got me talking about many things that I'm enthusiastic about. One of them is like actually improving trust in government. Right. There are lots of metrics about how trust in government's low. Turns out a lot of low income people are very low trust in government, despite the fact that the government gives them government benefits and helps them put food on the table or health care, housing, any number of other things. And I think in large part that's because again, the administration of the programs makes it very difficult to trust the government. Sure. How do you trust the entity if.

Like I talked to hundreds of Americans when I was running where they live in fear of having their benefits taken away. So it's like that kind of thing. Like there's not a lot of assurance.

And so I think like fixing administration of benefits, this kind of mundane technical thing about making websites and apps work better. And again, Propel is not the only company working on administration of benefits. Lots of other great companies are doing this work as well.

But I think compared to Propel, well.

I think if collectively we can be successful then I think it could have real ramifications on how much loan can people trust the government, how much they.

Want to participate, man. I mean, like, you know, like again, as someone who's talked to thousands of Americans myself, walking around like they just don't trust government's ability to deliver.

Yeah.

And so if you improve administration and people's experience day to day, and then they're like, oh, okay, like maybe you guys can do something about healthcare or whatever it is. But like now the trust is so low. And this to me, by the way, I mean this, this does aggravate me anytime I think about it, which unfortunately is really often. But what happens is you have this like this dysfunctional political system and the user experience of the average, you know, person on food stamps or whatever, it's like totally immaterial within our current political system as to like what happens with like this office holder or that office holder?

Sure.

You know, you have a 17% congressional approval rate and a 94% reelect rate. And so a lot of the individual Americans are like, you know, I don't matter. My vote doesn't matter. Like, the system is corrupt. It really would require a lot of folks like you and your team coming in and saying, okay, how are we going to actually make this work for you? How are we going to make it so that your experience is on par with what folks get in the commercial sector? And then if we do that consistently enough, then maybe you'll be like, oh, okay, like I'm actually now like a part of this thing or I'm more optimistic. And then if you tell me that, you know, I should do something or we can do something together, I'll actually listen.

Or that I should just vote because I believe in the system and I believe that matters right to people.

By the way, this is your problem. Problem. Our problem, I'm going to say, with trying to organize the porn the same way the AARP is that it's the reverse where like every old person votes totally and the voting rate among poor people is low, you know, because of what we're describing.

Exactly. Yeah. We've done a little bit of work every election around like voter registration through our platforms. To your point about like, do I, do I put my face in front of 5 million people? No, but we do try to do things like, hey, you know, here's a deadline to register to vote, here's a link for how to do it online, those types of things as kind of a, a small part in that. But I think it is, it is much, it's part of this much broader like, thing that we need to fix in this country, which is that we need to make a government that low income people believe in because otherwise you end up in this kind of weird adversarial state where it's like, yeah, the government's like skeptically like, yeah, I'll give you these benefits, but I'm going to put you through all these tests first. And low income people don't feel great about that either. They're like, oh, you're just, you're like, you're trying to quiz me on this thing all the time and it just catch you. Yeah, it's like, it's all done.

No suit for you.

Right.

It's dark, it's dark, it's dark.

And I think it's to me, such a missed opportunity because we're spending so much hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Anyway, we're just doing it in this weird, adversarial, negative way.

Well, it's a beautiful vision you have, Jimmy, and I'm sure a lot of people here would love to be helpful. So aside from telling their friends who might benefit directly from PayPal services about you all, what else can folks do to be helpful?

Well, you can visit our website at Propel app. Relative to, you know, to the point that we were talking about earlier with, with press, actually, if anyone in the audience is, is a journalist interviewing or who's writing a story about low income Americans and wants to talk to low income Americans and see how their lives are affected by whatever the particular thing is, you know, please contact us. We have, we have people who would love to talk to the press and express their opinions and make sure that their views are heard. So, so that, that, you know, that's.

Certainly something, you know that there's. There was a group, I think it was called the Poor People's Movement. It was started by Reverend William Barber. Are you familiar with them? They organized a series of events. Yeah, I was always an admirer. And you know, it's like I wish that the poor had a greater voice. So I hope that journalists do reach out. And I think you have such a great vantage point as someone who actually is helping them live better lives every day. And as someone who yourself, I mean, you have, you know, dynamite life leading a successful company, you know, living in Brooklyn with a lovely family and whatnot. But you made a choice that very, very few people do out of Silicon Valley and you've done it in such like an incredibly positive, impactful way. Do you get your, you know, props and flowers down to Stanford bring you back and being like this guy, Just try to be this guy. And these other jokers that you're not really bibbling about.

They did bring me back for an award a couple years ago, which was really great.

Oh well, you deserve it. And then some. Excited to do all we can to make it so that the people you serve have a better seat at the table, whether it's part of these news stories. But Jimmy, man, like really, I get some credit for doing things for folks who could use more. But you have actually done it on the ground and I just admire you so much for it.

Thank you so much for saying that. Look, I admire you a ton as well. I think you and I have very similar missions around this kind of stuff and we've just approached it through different toolkits. I'M a nerdy engineer who builds apps and does stuff in software and you've had just wild successes talking about this on the national stage and drawing a lot of attention to key issues and like rallying and movement and so you know it takes people of all different skill sets and all different perspectives like none of us is going to solve any of these types of problems alone is always going to be a team effort so just excited to be part.

Of the team dude it'd be so much fun if you were actually in charge of all the government benefits. You and your team was like all right now we're going to it would.

Be a lot overwhelming I'm sure.

I mean I, I have a, I have a dream and like that that's the vision that is going to come to pass X years from now you're going to be like all right how we, how do we do this stuff better?

Yeah Sam.