Wisetack | Fintech for the Real World

Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. Today we're rebroadcasting our episode featuring the founders of fintech startup Wisetac, which just closed a $45 million Series B round. Wisetac provides a financing platform for in person service businesses like home or auto repair. It's been a hit with customers since launching in 2019. Wisetac was incubated at Greylock and general partner Josh McFarland sits on the company's board. Josh spoke with Wisetac co founders Bobby Zecken and Liz O' Donnell back in February, just after the company closed its Series A. You can find a transcript of this conversation and more information about Wisetac on greylock.com blog.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. Josh I'm Josh McFarland, a partner at Greylock and your host for today. Technology has totally changed the way people shop for and procure products. The rise of e commerce has led to a wave of innovation around payment options and tools, which means consumers now expect a choice when it comes to financing. The option to buy now and pay later without incurring credit card debt has resonated strongly with consumers buying items online. But purchasing in person services like home and auto repair is another matter. Even though these businesses are embracing new technology for invoicing and payments, they've been stuck only offering old school, expensive financing options. That's where my guests Bobby Zecken and Liz o' Donnell come in. Bobby and Liz are co founders of wisetac, a company that saw the lack of consumer friendly payment options for in person services and did something about it. Bobby, Liz, welcome to graymatter.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks.

All right, let's start with the basics. How does wisetac work?

There's two parts to what we do. One that you already alluded to is we let consumers pay over time for large purchases. And we especially like to do that when they're shopping for things in person. Things like home repair or home improvement or car repair. These are businesses that historically had struggled to offer consumer friendly financing options. The other part of it that's also really interesting for us is the technology piece. We're an API platform. We reach our customers and we reach the businesses we work with by integrating with the software providers that the businesses already use. And in the past decade or so, a lot of these small businesses that focus on in person services have started to adopt modern technology as you mentioned, and we're built to work with that modern technology. We embed into the software and we make it incredibly easy for the businesses to offer consumer friendly options and then for their customers to benefit from that.

So I always like to use a consumer example to explain the model. Cause everyone's a consumer. So let's say you're a homeowner and you need a water heater replacement. You'll call a plumber. The plumber will come to your house and tell you, okay, we can repair it. That'll cost you a few hundred dollars. We could replace it with the same model you had, that's $1,800. Or we could install a tankless water heater. Here are the benefits. That'll be $2,400, something like that. Now most Americans don't have $2,400 in cash on hand, but let's say they want to go for that longer lasting, quicker heating, tankless water heater. I act like I'm a homeowner, like I've ever purchased a water heater. I know a lot about water heaters now. So the plumber will say, do you want to see financing options? And the plumber, in this case, they are using a software to help manage their business. And that's another big thing in the industry is that, you know, the plumber who used to manage their business on pen and paper will now manage it through software to, you know, keep their clients going, to keep a client record, to issue invoices, estimates, take payments, usually vertical, specific features. And so the plumber will say, okay, well you know, if you're really looking for that top of the line water heater, do you want to see your financing options? Plumber will issue an estimate and the consumer can see their financing options right from that estimate. So the plumber doesn't have to go to a separate app. The consumer can, you know, see everything right there. It's already in their flow of business.

Using that example, there's a couple of benefits to the consumer. One is a lot of times that in the example of the better water heater, that's a more energy efficient appliance that over time will cost less. So if you could only afford to buy the better thing and actually the lifetime cost is lower and, and the second part is in general, the financing options that we offer would be significantly better than the most common way a consumer would usually handle that, which is revolve on a credit card.

So if I think about as you just pointed out, what's happening in the consumer landscape is when we go through an E Commerce checkout process, we get presented with this new option, which is fixed payment per month provided by an affirm or an afterpay or a Klarna. Amazing businesses. And when we met, I remember being struck by this concept and this idea as being a when idea, not an if idea. Right? So when I think about the different pitches that that I receive as a venture capitalist, sometimes you get presented with an if idea. If this technology can be created, if this market actually exists, then this company will be successful. And what I felt about wisetac and the way that you pitched it was, this is a when idea. This is when somebody builds it in the right way, with the right technology, with the right scalable distribution, this company will just be successful. And when I evaluate when ideas, a big part of what I look at is the background of the team and whether or not I think they are uniquely positioned to pull this off. Can you guys just walk me through a little bit of your background and the experience that you've had along the way that gave you the clear insight that now was the time to start a company like wisetac?

Happy to. And I think our backgrounds are intertwined. So I like to introduce myself by saying I've been in fintech since before it was called fintech for close to 20 years. The first 10 were in payments, and seven of those were in PayPal, where I worked with Liz, which is how we know each other. And after my online payments experience, I moved to lending. I was head of product at Lending Club for four years, and after that was head of product product at Mosaic, which is another fintech. And that experience very much informed everything we do because we're at the intersection of payments and lending. And I'll let Liz tell her story as well.

We work together at PayPal. If Bobby was in fintech before fintech was a word. I was in fintech before Bobby at PayPal. And this was a while ago, but it was a really great time where, you know, our roles and we worked in different aspects of the business, but our roles were about expanding payments to global markets. So expanding payments to markets where it was a lot more difficult to take credit cards online. You know, PayPal really was a game changer for that. And so, you know, at the time, and still today, but certainly at the time, PayPal was a really innovative company. Since then, I've been in and out of the payments world and also in and out of consumer tech. And worked with small businesses as well. So my background is really more on the go to market side of things. And then we have another co founder, Kolya, and he also came from Lending Club and he's got the strong technology background and was at Varo Money after that.

Yeah, Kolya and I work together at Lending Club and in general, the entire senior team, not just the founding team, are folks with a lot of experience in payments, lending and technology. And I think we've been able to really benefit from having that on the team.

So I think, speaking from personal experience, it's incredibly powerful when a co founding team has worked together before, especially in an industry that is so closely related to the type of innovation that you're targeting now. And I absolutely see that in the early days of wisetac. So right now we're together, you all are announcing the, the fundraise, the $19 million that you've taken from investors, including Greylock as lead. Tell me about though, the process of deciding to raise that money, how you started the business and some of the thoughts and trade offs that you had along the way as you have been bringing this idea to market.

I'll start with my recollection of it on the fundraiser. Actually there were a couple pieces. One was, as you said, it felt this is a win idea and we felt a very strong business case that we were very confident in. And it was also clear that to maximize that idea, you wouldn't bootstrap it because the hurdle to starting a business that deals with people's money is higher. And when the founding team came together, it was clear to us that for us to do justice to the business, we should capitalize it early. And we were lucky to get connected with you pretty early on. I think we've been thoughtful about how to put together all aspects of the company, from the technology to partnerships we've put in place to the early people we brought on. But one of the really important decisions that we made was who to work with. And what made a huge difference was that you and Greylock also had a plan and they had done as you mentioned, you dug in, you did the work, you understood what we were building and that was really important for us. When we talked about what's the right, what's the right path forward, and I tell everyone it was one of the best decisions we made.

Yeah, and I'll jump in here. As Bobbi said, this is not a business that you can really bootstrap. So it was obvious to us that we had to raise seed Money. Then the next question was how much and from whom. And one of the things that you know, we appreciated from Josh is a very thoughtful approach and quite honestly the interests of companies and venture capital firms aren't always perfectly aligned. But Josh gave, you know, super thoughtful advice and Josh and Seth did a tremendous amount of due diligence which I think if, if you don't know what you're doing as a company could be scary. But if you do know what you're doing as a company and you know we like to think that we're competent people. I mean I, I do think industry experience matters a lot, matters a lot in fintech and much respect to, there are some very successful companies who've been started by people who don't have experience. But man, there's also a lot of companies that failed in fintech because they just didn't have that background. So if you know what you're doing, the level of due diligence. We got a lot of respect for the team at Greylock from the way they dug into our business.

Your kind words are so appreciated and I feel like a big part of the value that I got as a venture capitalist and working with you in those early days and just for our listeners benefit, when I extended the seed term sheet to Bobby and Liz and Kolia, I said here's an idea. What if you actually came and used some of the extra office space we have in San Francisco and just co locate with us. It's going to save you time and hassle of figuring out where all you're going to be spending time getting this thing off the ground. We can meet weekly, bi weekly, we can do strategy jamming sessions. I can help you recruit. I mean hey, if nothing else we got free lunch every day. And the benefit that I got is in really getting a firsthand first principles understanding of how you were going to go about building this business. Whether it was watching Kolia create a very consistent develop environment for everyone that was going to be on the tech team or seeing the quality of candidates that you were bringing through as part of your hiring process all the way down to even just seeing the vibe of your team working together and really getting a sense for, for the ethos of the company and the levity and the joy that you guys all had just working together, it was really fun and self servingly. It also reduced the risk in writing a much, much bigger check for your Series A. And I just think about how quickly companies sometimes raise money from venture capitalists. Maybe it's five days 10 days, you barely know each other versus the many weeks and months that we had to really work side by side before committing even more capital to business. And it was just, I got to say it was a pure joy just watching you, the three co founders, build the formation of this company before you've launched. Now changing a little bit to your go to market strategy. I mean tell me about some of your early customers from the software platform side and how you've seen them benefit from wisetac.

So far we have a few really good stories about the businesses who use us. And interestingly and I think unplanned from the moment we launched in Alpha, it turns out we launched with one of the biggest plumbing businesses around Salt Lake City that is known around the area because they're just everywhere. And we eventually ended up naming the conference room after them because one, they were always incredible to work with and not just for that, but they had fantastic feedback. First they were super positive. They said we love. You know, it's rare you don't expect when you launch a new product that the first customers are going to say we love everything about it. This is great, this is so good. So that was unexpectedly positive. Also they were tolerant whenever something didn't work. But they also did things like they had a customer who had tough personal situation and didn't have water. They donated a large part of their work to help out that customer. So just fantastic people who work really hard and we've really enjoyed actually working with all of our customers. And then another aspect is our integration partners, folks like housecall Pro. That has been an incredible relationship and we have several of these. I'll call out housecall as they were early and believed in us the way you did from before we had the product out in market. We've loved working with them because of their incredible customer focus, how much they care about their customers, how close they are to their customers and thankfully we found we share in that and we've shown that we have the same care and customer focus. And that's a big part, I think why that partnership and the other ones we have has been successful because we put the care in and we put the same importance on providing an amazing experience.

I'd also add that our first major partnerships are also venture backed companies because in 2019 we were talking to partners before we had a product and so we needed partners on the other side who kind of got that, that they weren't, you know, put off by the fact that we didn't have everything fully baked Yet. And then also who would appreciate the fact that if they asked for something, you know, hey, can you do it this way? We'd say, yes, we can. And you know, we kept on saying that and that became, that became Bobby's phrase. You know, every time we asked like, oh, can we do this? Bobby's like, the answer is yes, we can.

I think I got it from somewhere else.

So much so that it just reminded me of the Barack Obama campaign. So I took that Shefford Fairey poster, the one that, you know, everyone knows, the iconic art, the hope poster, and I was like, there must be be an easy way. You know, this was 2019 at the time and everything's available on the Internet. So I said there must be just some sort of website where I can like plug in a photo and make it into that style. And of course, you know, I just google Barack Obama poster maker and it pops up exactly what I want. So I ordered this 20 by 30 poster of Bobby using his LinkedIn profile, unbeknownst to him, in the Shepherd Fairey style. And then one day I got to the office early and just hung it up on the greylock wall and just to see if he would notice. And I don't know. Bobby, did you see it right? I can't remember your first reaction.

It was horror.

So we put it up and Bobby's like, yeah, we're gonna take that down pretty soon. And I was like, Bobby, this is what a CEO does. He puts the team before himself. The like, this brings us joy. And so we said, all right, all right, we will take it down when we get our first loan. So that poster was hanging up on the greylock wall in the Greylock San Francisco office. And like people walked by every day. Our desks were sort of towards the back of the office and you had to pass by them in order to go get to the bathrooms. And then coming back from the bathrooms was like on the wall in your face. And so I'm sure Bobby took a lot of heat from it.

I got some even as we were talking about the Series A from all the corners. So I let, I let, I'll put it on the record. I fell on the sword for the team's entertainment.

Yes, there you go. So we finally did take it down when we got our first loan. There's a video of it of the taking down ceremony. Bobby promised he'd send it to his mom. He has not yet fulfilled that promise.

Given that she's going to hear this, I know I am now committed, you.

Got to make it happen now. So Bobby, Liz, with your respective backgrounds in payments and lending and the number of years that you've been thinking about these problems, it feels to me like you have some really key insights into what's changing for both the consumer and the business. And on the consumer side it's a question of lending versus credit cards. And on the business side it's a question of why are the pre existing platforms that do do this type of consumer lending? Why are they not capable of also tackling this market?

That's a good question. And I guess I can just give you my experience because I come from the payment side of things and I did not have any lending background. And so I would ask, on the one hand you can call them naive questions about why would I pay this with a loan when I could just put it on my credit card. But on the other hand, those are the sort of questions that our business customers might be asking and their customers, our prospective borrowers, might be asking, like why should I do this? So actually from a marketing perspective, a naive perspective is really helpful. And what I didn't understand, and now that I've gotten a lot more in depth about the credit markets, is just how credit is set, set up and lending doesn't always have the best reputation. And to be honest, a lot of that is deserved. I think some of the more modern players are doing great things, but the history of lending is a long one. And things like compounding interest, deferred interest, those can be very difficult financial products to understand to a consumer. So the first time I heard about deferred interest, where it's like, oh, it's 0% for 18 months * and you read the fine print, like even I read the fine print and I couldn't quite understand the consequences where if you don't pay off that entire loan over 18 months, you pay a very high interest rate. Oftentimes it's something like 30% on the entire balance. So if you pay $990 on $1,000 loan, at first I was like, oh, that's no big deal. That's just 30% on $10. No, it's 30% on $1,000. And that is a very, very common product in the industry. So I think that there's a lot of opportunities to be super straightforward, super transparent. And then when you compare it to credit compounding interest, know credit cards have on average a high interest rate. So you know, another thing that I, that I learned from Bobby is that like if you have excellent, excellent Credit, your credit card interest rate is still pretty high. And so if you end up carrying a balance on that credit card, it's a very high interest rate, which doesn't really reflect your credit history, your credit worthiness. And that's. It's just kind of the way that credit cards are. There's a lot of reasons for it. There's a lot of reasons why it is the way it is. But because we are not giving people a line of credit for any item, for any period of time into perpetuity, but we are making a credit decision on a person at a specific point in time that tends to be relatively short term. We can make better credit decisions and offer better terms to people.

And I would add that there is a huge shift in consumer expectations and behavior. Part of it is driven by changes in the market. So these days, I think after the financial crisis, there's a lot more awareness in consumers about the risks of making the wrong choices when borrowing. And preferences have actively shifted into things like personal loans or paying in installments for a purchase. Part of that has been enabled just because the technology exists from the last decade to make those more easily available. But part of it is also an awareness in consumers that maybe wasn't there in the past. So with that shift happening, I think we're squarely there to enable better options that consumers these days are expecting. Every time they're considering a purchase, they're thinking about, okay, well, what does that mean as a financial decision? And in terms of your other question, would other players in the credit market address the opportunity? We're finding we're set up differently. And so the most modern providers of the options to pay over time focus on E Commerce retail. They also focus on working directly with large retailers. And both of those are very specific decisions around how their products work. An E Commerce checkout is a pretty linear experience, and a lot of the things we handle are nonlinear. And we've set up the business and the company and the product to support that. And even though it's a more complicated process, what we built and we've proven, we're able to provide a very, very fast, easy, simple, clear experience for both the businesses. And as we talked about, small businesses need everything to be simple. They're incredibly busy and also for the consumers. And not only is it easy and fast, as Liz was talking about, we have incredibly transparent financial products. We are not charging any fees to consumers. So that transparency, that customer friendliness, the ease and the simplicity, combined with the flexibility of the technology and the fact that we were built to integrate into software experiences that are already handling purchases. I think that combination is actually hard to replicate and it is our focus and obviously the entire market is shifting in that direction. I think everyone will be doing this and should be, but we're focused on it and I think the results we've had since we started the company are actually proving out that we're doing a good job of solving that.

So if I go back to our Greylocks thesis on investing in fintech, we have a couple of different aspects that we look for, but one that has already come up is this idea that we look for businesses that are more tech than fin and we also look for businesses that have somehow figured out a clever and scalable distribution mechanism. So Bobby, you talked about this with for example housecall Pro and the API integration there. But tell me more about your strategy of going to market. I mean, why not just go and offer this to consumers directly, right? Like why do you think that distributing through software makes the most sense for the platform that you're building?

I should say the criteria you listed were exactly what we were looking for as well when thinking about where to start the business. And the scalable distribution was absolutely critical for a few reasons. One, we are technologists and we wanted to use technology. We started with the customer need. So we knew that consumers need a better alternative when they're faced with unplanned large purchases. We knew that businesses have difficulty and actually we knew that we can simplify that experience for both sides. What we solved as we started to do the research was that go to market and distribution and we found that all these software providers like House CPRO that have come out in the last 10 to 15 years were in themselves had an unmet need that we could address through better technology. And I'm ecstatic that so far everything that we've observed in our trajectory is confirming I think above and beyond what we had in the business plan that we're able to meet that need. We are actually able to scale through technology. We're still a really small team and we've. I give Kolya huge credit for this. We've been able to build a platform that is scaling and is a better product because it works through technology and not through adding people, but not only on the go to market side but also on the back end and on the operations side.

Yeah, I'd add that technology is the key component because the reason that a lot of the businesses that we currently serve as have been underserved is because of technology or the technology wasn't there before. So without APIs integrating into these software platforms like Housecall Pro or one of our other major platforms, Jobber, you need those platforms in place to aggregate the businesses. Now, you could have a direct sales method, and that is a method that you can go and call every plumber and call every electrician and call every auto repair shop, and that is a business that works. But that is a tough business. I've marketed to small businesses before. They're incredibly difficult to reach because they're just bombarded all day. They're so busy, and they have to, you know, they have to figure out payroll and they have to get office space and they have to hire people, and then they also have to do their job, and they're getting called by Yelp salespeople. So reaching small businesses directly with something like a salesforce is really, really tough. And so because these software platforms now exist, and then because we're using APIs to integrate into those software platforms, we can serve customers that before were very, very difficult to serve. And we can do it at scale.

Yeah. And just to double down on that, we're able to provide a better product because we're integrated with something they already used and serve folks at scale at a lower cost. And it's driven by the technology, and that's why it scales in the way that we would expect it to.

That's a good point. Like, the ease of use is because of the technology. It is a better experience for our customers to access wisetac through, through the software that they already use. We're not making them go to a separate app. We're not making them go to a separate website if they don't want to. It is like ease of use. It is a business product. But the principles of the user design are really consumer principles is reduce the friction, meet people where they are, lower the cost. It's all small businesses are consumers, too. I mean, like, you know, enterprise buyers are also people, but small businesses behave a lot like consumers. And so bringing that consumer ethos to businesses is really what reduces the friction and increases the traction.

Aaron, on that note, we keep hearing from our customers, both the businesses and the consumers, how easy, how simple, and how fast our process is, which is a large part of it is enabled because we're integrated, because it's seamless and it's exciting when we hear that. That's where it gets us going when folks get excited about what we've done.

Yeah. I mean, it just feels like this is such the right time for a business like yours. You think about the pressures that Covid has brought to small businesses, but also the pressure that's brought to consumers and the ability to flip on a new. Really, it's, as you already said, it's the blending of payments and lending together, but done in such a seamless and simple way that it's as easy as, you know, clicking a checkbox in the software they already use. That lights up the ability to just ease the pressure on the consumer, but also the small business in a time when I think they need it most. So one of the things that also has impressed me about you and the way that you built the company, and this, again, is very apropos in the time of COVID is you've thought about the company in a distributed fashion, particularly on the technology side, and how Kolia has built that out using resources from around the world. How do you both think about creating this company in the leadership from the perspective of a distributed team today? Because we have to. Right. We're working remotely. But then even as you scale, it feels like it's kind of been embedded from day one in how you want to build this.

Absolutely. We were a distributed team, I believe, certainly from month one, if not day one. And when everyone had to go distributed, we were able to do that over the course of a weekend. We used to have an office in San Francisco. The folks who were in the Bay Area would meet there. And when the restrictions around Covid started to happen, we made that one Friday. We said, it's clear where this is going. It doesn't make sense for us to come into the office anymore. And on Monday, nothing really had changed. The company operated in the exact same way. Everyone was at home. So that was a huge benefit. But even before that, it was clear that we're able to get incredible talent. And by broadening our talent pool beyond the Bay Area, we were able to just get incredible folks who have been with us since the beginning of the company, and we plan on continuing to do that. We are constantly thinking about how do we operate in that model, because it's different. It's different when you're not seeing someone every day, every week. So how do we build culture? How do we share information? And we're thoughtful about that. I think it's making us a better company. And it was even before everyone was forced to deal with these same challenges.

Yeah, it's something I think about a lot because any company, as you go through growth stages, the culture changes. So there's that. And Layered on top of that is the fact that everyone's remote now. And, you know, at some point we, we will go back to an office. We actually, we've certainly made that decision. There's enough people who want an office, but what does that look like? It's not, it's not going to be the same as before. So I pay attention a lot to what other companies are doing and how they're thinking about this. And it's just strange. There's certainly parts that I miss. Of the people that are on my team, all but one were hired after Shelter In Place took effect in San Francisco. Two of them I have never met. It's great that it's possible, but I think once we have more options, I think we still will have to experiment and be very deliberate about how we create and maintain a good culture.

We have a few amazing people that we've never met in person. You only get the frame, the video calls.

It's testament to the foundation of the company that you built before we all went into lockdown. But it also is a testament to the fact that you, from day one built this company in a way that could scale without everybody having to be in the same room at all times. So, Bobby, Liz, I've got to say, the last board update that you sent was, I think, Bobby, maybe you coined the phrase or used the phrase a barn burner of a scenario in terms of growth. And if I look at, as a board member and an investor, 15x year over year growth in the core metrics that you all track, it's intense. Like this is a very intense time of the business when you are scaling not just in the verticals that you started in, for example, home repair and you talked about the plumbers, but across verticals and that you stay in pursuit of this larger goal and larger mission. How do you think about balancing all of that in a time of hyper growth? You know, like getting this machine to go faster and faster without the wheels coming off and also adding parts to it, which only adds complexity. How do you think about balancing all of that as leaders?

First, I think we got to give credit to Eddie, who coined the barn burner financial plan for us. Eddie's our head of finance and risk. If I could step back just a little bit from the question. As I mentioned in the beginning, we tried to be incredibly thoughtful in building the company. And I think we've been able to lay a foundation of how we've built the product in a way that is allowing us to scale without compromising quality. And if anything, we're actually all of our metrics around quality are continuously improving as we're significantly growing the business and we're able to both launch new things incredibly fast on the foundation that we've built. And again, a big part of that is the way the technology works. And Cole has done an incredible job of setting that up. We've also had a few other key components, the kind of partnerships and business decisions we've made that allowed us to focus first on building an amazing product. And our number one goal for last year was to have a fantastic product that customers love and validate all the core aspects of. Is this a viable business that's serving something very valuable to its customers? And we will always continue to put that first. So even as we're pushing for growth and, and are growing this business quite fast, the number one thing is continue to maintain and improve quality, which is what we've done.

Yeah, I would add that we put together our high level priorities early in 2019, like right as we got our seed round and it was very clear and we've always repeated that it's building a product that customers really value is number one. It remains number one to this day having good risk metrics. We are a financial business. That's super important. So making sure that we understand, understand the risk and then growth came third. And so we've always been very deliberate that those are the priorities in that order. And you know, certainly it was weighted in the very early days much more towards building the product, product. And now that we've got, you know, product market fit, we've got great partners on board who are investing in us, we can, you know, push on growth a lot more this year. But we couldn't do it without that foundation. And I think again, that's another benefit of being experienced founders is that we've all worked in businesses where focus was, you know, everything. So I think we've kind of learned that we need some sort of focus. We need to drive ourselves hard, but also we need to understand what is going to drive the business long term. And also, you know, having those conversations internally and having them with the board saying, hey, we're a partnership driven company, we are not going to be able to hit monthly sales goals in our first year. We don't have that predictability. A lot of our growth is product driven and you know, having that relationship where we can say like, okay, we understand this business, we can focus on the long term because there's not that micromanage pressure in which sometimes I'VE seen first time founders just, you know, get a little panicked and lose that focus. That makes it difficult to focus on the long term.

Let's spend a little bit of time talking about that long term because I totally agree with you, Liz. And one of the things I've always appreciated about how you've built this business is you're not sacrificing everything for next month, next quarter. So zoom out a little bit and tell me what you think the world looks like for both consumers as well as the businesses that you facilitate. And what does wisetac look like? I don't know. Call it two, three, even five years from now. Like, where do you think all of this goes?

We have huge ambitions and the good news is it starts with what we've already been able to accomplish, which is happy customers. And I think as long as we can continue to create amazing experiences for customers, we'll be able to scale to a point where we're helping out a lot of people and touching a lot of folks. But our ambitions are huge. And what, what we're seeing is, as you mentioned, the market is changing, so consumers are increasingly expecting and using better options. And we view ourselves as the infrastructure that enables those better financing options and better options to pay over time in any experience, any channel, any software. So we have a platform that is intentionally built in a way that can handle very different experiences. Non linear shopping. So usually when you're working on your home or getting some other service done, there's a conversation around, well, do you want this piece or do you want to choose something else? So those nonlinear experiences are something that we've solved. And by building that in from day one and solving for the complex cases and making that simple and easy, I think gives us tremendous Runway to scale the platforms we integrate with the businesses we serve, user experiences, channels, and at the end of the day, underneath it is a technology for managing risk and making all of that incredibly simple for customers.

Yeah, I would add, and we talked earlier in the conversation about having a payments background and point of sale lending being at the intersection of payments and lending. Having a payments background is a little bit like looking into the future when you come then to lending, because there's so much innovation in payments and lending. Again, I think the technology sector of lending is a little bit behind where repayments is. Having worked in lending, we can see like, oh, this could be easier, this could be quicker, this could be more consumer friendly and we can work those innovations into a lending model and lending is a better way to borrow. Than payments. You know, we've talked about it before. Use a credit card. It's very high interest rates. It's compounding. So we can deliver a better credit product, but using some of the user experience, experience from payments. So there's just still so much that we can take from the payments world that exists today in payments and bring it to lending.

I'll say once again just how pleased and how proud I am to be in business with you all. When I look at the future for wisetac, I see a future in which any purchase in the real world with a service provider of any sort that, say, clears a few hundred dollars. I really hope that wisetac financing is an option and for all of the reasons that you just highlighted, I think the surety of the amount per month, the fact that you guys are not, you know, charging these insanely high interest rates, and the fact that it just provides a way of easing friction for small businesses and consumers, this, to me, feels like it's going to be part of the way that we transact in the real world. And I hope that wisetac is the platform behind every single one of them.

That's what we're aiming for.

Are you writing your series B deck, Josh?

Precisely. Precisely. Although, you know, honestly, at the rate you're growing, any venture capitalist would be lucky to put money into this. And so maybe I'm just going to hog it all myself.

And it's been amazing to work with you.

Well, Bobby, Liz, really want to thank you for your time today and look forward to many, many more great years together.

Same here. Thanks so much.

Thank you.