From 0 to Multibillion-Dollar IPO and 4.2 Million Customers with Matt Oppenheimer, Remitly

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AI focus is key at any stage of a company. That starts with having a clear corporate strategy, having a clear product strategy, and then having a clear technical architecture to accomplish that product strategy and then ultimately hiring the right leaders. It all comes down to team and culture because once that scaffolding is set, its leaders then need to be making the right trade offs around how we iterate towards accomplishing that strategy and vision. Being able to delegate to them in the right ways with the right scaffolding and corporate strategy and product strategy is how you actually scale a business because you're not going to make every product or resource trade off at a centralized level. You've got to get the right team that can make those trade offs themselves. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

Hey Traction Fam. Our guest today is Matt Oppenheimer, the co founder and CEO of Remitly, a leading digital financial services provider for immigrants worldwide. He took the company from zero to multi billion dollar ipo. Matt's received a number of prestigious awards such as the International Service Excellence Award for Customer Service, CEO of the Year and EY Entrepreneur of the Year. I'm super excited to have Matt on the show today. He's going to break down his journey going from a founder with an idea all the way to a company with locations all over the world and valued at billions of dollars. Matt, thanks for joining us. How you doing today?

No, great Lloyd, thanks for having me. I'm super excited about the conversation and reflecting on the journey and hopefully helping some of your listeners reflect on their own journey.

You've had a successful journey, a Long career as a founder. What has it been, 10 years?

Yeah, it's been just past the 12 year mark. May of 2011.

Anything worth doing takes a long time. Give us your backstory. What was the inspiration behind starting remitly and addressing the challenges in international money transfer?

Yeah, the inspiration is I've traveled close to a hundred countries throughout my life, lived and worked on three continents and throughout a lot of my travels, including when I was a young kid. I grew up in Boise, Idaho in the U.S. but my family always really valued travel because of that. And so we went to China and Japan in the 80s. That was my first international trip that I remember. And then as I mentioned, over my life I've traveled to close to 100 countries. So when I was professionally thinking about what I wanted to do after business school, I joined Barclays bank in London. Not in investment banking, but in a general management program in retail and corporate banking. But I joined it so I could do a stint in East Africa, which I had traveled to and visited a few times before. So I was head of mobile and Internet banking initiatives for Barclays Bank Kenya, based out of Nairobi. And I saw how painful it was for me to send money internationally. I was getting paid in British pounds because I was working for Barclays. I was living in Kenya shillings. I eventually had to get money back to US dollars and that was a pain. But it was a much bigger pain and a much more important thing for a lot of my Kenyan friends who had relatives in Europe, who had relatives in the US and were getting money for their basic living expenses. One of my friends, Fiona, used her sister's bank of America debit card. And I was like, how is this? The fees, the inconvenience, just old antiquated system of doing things. Seemed like it was the right time to build a business that not only can really transform remittances, but now our vision is really to improve the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services.

So early days and challenges. What did the first six to 12 months of working on remitly look like? How did you get your first customers, validate the market, et cetera?

May of 2011, working for Barclays and moved back to London briefly and then I moved back to Boise, Idaho where I'm from. Most businesses I think have a strong business founder or business mind, oftentimes that overlaps with product and then a strong technical co founder. And so I knew I needed to get much more plugged into the product and engineering world. And so I applied to Accelerator called techstars, techstars Seattle. That brought me from Boise to Seattle and it was really there. And we're talking pretty short timelines. I leave my job in May. I applied to techstars in June. I'm in Seattle by I think August of that year. Still haven't launched a product yet. Because one of the things that is super important for us as a business is to do things the right way, especially as a fintech company. You can relate, Lloyd, given your background in terms of things fintech, highly regulated, highly complex. And we waited. We have to get a money transmission license in every single state and you have to raise capital to get that license. You have to. In order to raise capital, you have to have a product. I can talk about all the chicken and egg problems that we faced, but basically got into techstars pre product and techstars back then was only in a few cities. It was a much different program than it is now. That really helped me plug into the product and engineering world. Met my two co founders joined by that fall and we raised our first $750,000 convertible note. I hear about like seed rounds now and I'm like, our first seed round was a $750,000 convertible note that we needed to be able to get a license in the state of Washington. We needed to be able to get a product launched. And basically it was this iterative process to eventually get our product launched about a year after founding the business, just from the state of Washington to the Philippines. And I can go through the whole journey of what I call chicken and egg problems in terms of the grit, the tenacity, the perseverance that was required to get a product launched and live. I can go through fundraising process in more depth. I can go through co founding dynamics and co founding teams and how to find great co founders. I can go through the early marketing and like product market fit days. But all of that was in that first six months.

That is amazing. All of that was in six months. So let's go through. How did you find your co founders? Because people build companies, not the other way around. So let's start there, then we can dive into, hey, how did you validate the idea and get your first customer?

Yes, I totally agree. People build businesses. So my first co founder, we kind of joke his name, Shabazz Gulati. The punchline that we joke around is I say we met via Twitter and he says we met via Brad Feld, who was one of the folks who tweeted. He's obviously a well known venture investors in the US and basically he introduced us. But I passed the net wide to find a really strong technical co founder. I probably met 10 or 15 folks. And the thing about Shavas is he is incredibly entrepreneurial. He was aligned in terms of building a company that mattered. From a cultural standpoint, he was super committed to our mission. So we had all of these things that were similar, but then we had incredibly complimentary skills. If folks are thinking about co founding a business, you've got to have that cultural overlap and trust, but having completely separate skills. He was an engineer. I brought the kind of product element is critical. And then my second co founder was actually after we got into techstars. So we got into techstars and we needed somebody who was senior from a product and engineering standpoint. It was coming from banking, so it was not deep in terms of that network. And the way that techstars works is it's a mentorship program. Are you familiar with techstars?

Very familiar. I also mentor in a couple of their locations.

Oh cool. It's a mentorship program. And Josh hugs our second co founder. And he was our lead mentor. He was our star mentor. And Josh and I just hit it off. I was learning a ton from him. He was co founder and CEO of his previous business that he sold to Amazon. He knew he didn't want to be CEO of his next business, but he knew he deemed a strong CEO, leader, co founder. And I didn't have any of the product engineering expertise, nor did I have the track record that he did. So the minute that he joined, everybody that backed his last company wanted to double down and invest in Josh again. And it made a lot of the other problems like fundraising and other things like that solve themselves. Because your point, it comes down to people and you bring the right people on board. You look at unexpected places. Perhaps. I don't think it's typical that a mentor of a company joins as a co founder within techstars, but it was a perfect fit. He's been with the company 12 years since and is an amazing partner. And so that's how I met the two of them.

That is fantastic. And that jiving between. It's like a band, the complimentary skill set. The alignment on values is so important. I see most co founders in the early days that fall apart and even later. There's no alignment on values. Yeah. If one person, say, thinks you're a good engineer and the other person thinks you're not a good salesperson and then there is no alignment or maybe one person has a different definition of success than the other person. So that alignment is key across everything. What was that common thing that brought you guys together, that you guys aligned up?

So what we did as a founding team three months into starting the business is we did an offsite where we actually said what kind of culture we want to create. This is before we had a product, before we had capital is for anything. And these whiteboards are from that initial offset. This is now 12 years ago when we were three months into the journey. And what you can see in the bottom right there is customer centricity has always been there. Like you look at our values now you Google remitly values and you can see that is something that has not changed. The other was the intent, was there like relationships as an example. We could talk a lot about culture later that has evolved. We refresh our values every year to make them more actionable, to make them more authentic, to make them better and more integrated into the company. But I'd say the punchline answer your question is from day one we are aligned on a common mission, common purpose, common focus around serving our customers, which in our business is pretty impactful, pretty heartfelt, pretty profound. And so I think that's been the foundation since day one.

Great companies are built on great alignment. So that's the good way to start. And it also gives you this rubric for scoring other people. For example, if integrity is a very important thing and you don't act according to integrity, you're focusing on money, maybe then you may make a decision like, hey, we have this top high flying salesperson who's behaving a little off, but we want to keep them and that compromises your integrity.

Right?

Because employees don't watch your lips or what's written on the website. They actually look at your actions and then they check out the way we think about culture.

And again you can Google like remitly cultural values and you'll see our publicly facing values. You'll see definition, one or two sentence definition of each. And I think that culture is how people interact. It's how people get things done. Right? It's like every company has it. Some companies do a good job defining it, some don't. And what we've done every year is refresh those values roughly once a year. It used to be even more frequently, now it's a little less frequently, but we still refresh those values. And they're all meant to be like a memorize, like I'm never going to quiz anybody at Remitly like, hey, Sarah, values, because it's a longer, more comprehensive list. But if that list is defined well, then it does give a North Star and a nomenclature to be able to interview and screen the right candidates, to be able to do performance reviews, to not only measure the output, but how those outputs are achieved. And then everything in between is where the magic happens. And so I mention all of that because going back to integrity, I think the intent was always there with integrity, but I didn't use it that often because integrity was one of those things that it feels more binary. So in that magic in between point, obviously if somebody doesn't have integrity, you exit them from the organization. That is something that you have to have. But because it was so binary, I wanted to evolve it in a way that actually is a little more customer centric and a little bit more nuanced. So now you'll see what our value is, is earn trust through integrity. Because ultimately, if we get deeper into our customers and what they care about, it's trust. I used to think it was about speed, about price, about all these tangible benefits. Those are part of building trust. But it's trust, and it turns out when you reword it that way, to say earned trust through integrity, there are areas where it can become more of a dialogue and discussion around how well a remitly team member is doing that versus not. And it's become a lot more actionable, a lot more authentic. So I mentioned that in the sense culture has always been there in terms of an intentional approach to it. But like anything as you're building a business, you don't nail it out of the gate. You got to evolve and learn and grow as the company learns and grows. And I think that's how we've approached culture as well.

I think the first rule is let's not screw our customers and net, not screw our employees, and let's do things right. But over time, I think it's very important to evolve because it's a rubric for hiring even now. How big is your company today? How many employees? We're about 3,000, 3,000 employees scattered all over the world.

Right.

How do you make sure people are aligned on vision, mission, on values, when you're not in the room?

I think one is you've got to have the right scaffolding or infrastructure. So I think if you were to see within remitly, I think that our values are clear and different. And I showed that deck because that's like a welcome to remitly. All new team Members outside of customer support, all new team members in groups of 10 or 15 people. I meet with and I talk through the history, the strategy, a bit about the culture, et cetera. And I think that's a big part of it, is hearing from me like how much culture matters, what it means, some of the conversations we're having now. But then ultimately I can't scale just with conversations happening with me. And so I need to hire the right leaders, the right executives across the company that can then instill the same culture that we want to create at a company level. And if there's one thing that I'm okay at, it's surrounding myself with really good people. And given how large we are as a company now, that's a pretty broad group of individuals. But it's about hiring the right people and then empowering those people to lead and setting the right goals that we're trying to achieve and then supporting them to go after that and ultimately serve our customers.

When you are a founder, you're not really a CEO. You're an individual contributor. And then as you maybe hire a few people, you become a manager, and then you hire managers, you become a vp. So it's really important to have a rubric by which you hire and fire people. How have you set that rubric in place in the company? So now you got VPs, SVPs, BI layering structure.

Right. I think the first step with culture is define it, which we talked about. And then once you've defined it, then I think it is important to have a pretty rigorous and structured process both for interviews and for performance reviews. And so you would see that within remotely now, in terms of how an interview is done, who's on the loop within that loop, what specific not only skills, but cultural values that each interviewer is focused on going deep on. So you might have one interviewer that's focused on continuous improvement and lead authentically and can go deep there, while another might be focused on bias for action and sweat the details as an example. And so I think having that structure and rigor is really important. I think how to try to remove unconscious bias and just bias of having the most senior person in the room speak first or form an opinion first is really important. And so we have folks submit interview feedback in advance to make sure that everyone's coming in with an opinion and a written formed opinion and basis for that opinion on the interview front. And I could go through similar processes that we do on the performance review side. But here's the deal. For folks listening to this, it sounds like these are like big company things that we established over time. Like we've had loops and like that kind of rigor and structure since our third hire, whatever it was, super early days, it's gotten better. But some of those practices, regardless of the stage and size of a company, need to be in place early so that folks are interviewing and then performance managing based on a commonly set clear definition of values in addition to the skill assessment. And so I'd encourage folks listening to this or whatever stage you're at to really think about that process. Because in my view, it's never too early. And the analogy I draw just to make it real is like, let's say you're hiring your fifth employee. You told me that this hire, that this one hiring decision was 20% of my company, was 20% of my overall headcount. I would be losing days and weeks of sleep over that hire. And so how you instill a little bit of structure early days in the hiring and in the performance review process and in that ongoing dialogue being foundationally set in a common list of values, critically important, don't wait to do it, do it early.

Well said. Because the compound interest on that is huge. And you don't want to build a skyscraper on a cracked up or shaky foundation.

Exactly.

So let's switch to building your customer base. How did you get your first customers? At what point did you think you had product market fit? What were some challenges you faced there?

I'll start on the product market fit front. I think that it's super important as an entrepreneur to fall in love with a problem, but not a solution. So that was number one. The early days. I actually was just annoyed. I didn't know how much it would cost to send money internationally. So I tried to build a Kayak.com or Skyscanner like the Google flights, like the search engine for understanding the cost of remittances. Very quickly before building much product, I found a bunch of other businesses that either didn't achieve the vision of what I wanted to do, which is really transform international payments, or didn't have clear business models to be able to do that. And so we pivoted to do the really hard work of becoming a money transmitter, which is not for the faint of heart, but I pivoted around the problem I was trying to solve with a pretty flexible approach to the solution that I had for it. So I think that's one. A lot of entrepreneurs come in and be like, we've got the best idea, got the best product and it's like, we'll take a set, like, what's the problem you're trying to solve? And how are you pivoting the solution to solve that problem? And how do you have the right hypotheses that you're focused on testing as fast as possible, oftentimes before even building product? Because building product's super expensive. And most companies fail because they run out of time, energy, resources, actually getting to a product that reaches that product market fit. So there's a bunch of books written about this. Eric Reese's Lean Startup is the one that's most well known, but that's one we pivoted from being the search engine to being the direct remittance provider. I think the second principle that was helpful for us is focus. I think a lot of companies try to do everything at once. And when you're bootstrapped you mentioned, Lloyd, you were bootstrapped to the next level. But when you're bootstrapped, you have to focus. Right? You can't do everything at once. And so for us, we've always had this big vision that I mentioned. But not only did we start within remittances, we started just with Washington State, where we got our first license to the Philippines. And now to your question of how we kind of got product markets and how we got our first customers. We tried to really authentically get to know the communities and customers that we serve. So I joined the Filipino Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest. I brought on the former president of the chamber as an advisor. He got some early remitly equity, which is super gratifying for me to see. He was at our IPO 12 years later. And via that, we actually really talked with customers to pivot around the product to solve the problem that we had seen. And there were other pivots along the way, like at the very beginning, because I came from living in Kenya and seeing that money was being transferred into mobile wallets, I thought that it was going to be just us to the Philippines sending money to mobile wallets. Now mobile wallets are a lot more popular, often for funds disbursement in the Philippines, a wallet called GCASH especially. But back then nobody was using mobile, so we had to pivot to do cash pickup and bank deposit, door to door delivery, even in some markets. And so it was that authentic interaction with our customers that gave us that signal and that feedback. Because at the end of the day, customers will be very fast to not buy your product. They'll be very fast to say, that's okay. But it actually is hard because they're not a ton in your average customer to actually take a step back and be like, here's why that product doesn't meet my needs. Here's why you're wrong, and here's the actual problem that I have and how you might be able to solve it. And I think that our early days of getting to know the Filipino community in Seattle really helped with that. And then it also helped us pursue marketing channels that don't scale, which is a phrase that I like a lot and I learned from Brian Chesky in the early days of Airbnb in terms of what he's done. But we did that as well. And I'm going to stop after this because I'm throwing a lot at you. We can go in whatever direction. But when I say marketing channels that don't scale, one of the things we did with the Filipino Chamber is in Seattle, there's a grocery store called Seafood City, which is where a lot of Filipino customers shop in that grocery store. It's part of a mall. There's two remittance centers that are like Philippine specific remittance centers. And what we did is we rented the booth in the mall right outside those two remittance centers and the grocery store. And the reason we did that is not because we thought we were going to scale a bunch of customer acquisition via this, like, physical mall booth. As a tech company, the reason we did it is because it helped us engage and interact with our customers more authentically. And the advisor that I mentioned helped us do that as well. He helped staff. It helped us really get to know and engage the dialogue with the community. And via that, we pivoted to the product that customers wanted, which was a digital option to be able to send money to a wide range of funds disbursement options that I mentioned. Cash pickup, bank deposit, mobile wallet, you name it. And from that, we started to find marketing channels that scaled. We started to understand our unit economics and started to grow over time. But that's how we got there in early days.

Amazing, you know, early days of boast. I remember nobody would do business with us because we were competing with the big four accounting firms. And so we said, what is the best way to get customers? Well, we sell to founders. Everyone is in the same boat like us. So why don't we host meetups? At the very least, as we have a bit of a network, we'll invite speakers to come like this. And we started hosting pizza nights. We very unscalable Every time, maybe first time 10 people showed, then 20, then 30. One day the co working space had 200 people. They kicked us out and they're like, guys, can't do this again. This is a conference that involved in the attraction conference which has 140,000 subscribers. But you could see our journey. You know, the more events we did, the more the path was going up. But you're right, in the early days you have no luxury to scale. And so you got to do one thing you really well. Because prior to boast I was part of venture backed companies. You raise money, you do more and more and more. I think Dave Packard has a quote, more companies die of indigestion than starvation. And in everything in life actually, right, you die from indigestion more than you die from starvation. Taking on just more and more, you cram yourself, you get all stressed and things fail. So that is great. What was that feeling or that moment where you said, hey, I have product market fit. This is going to be a massive business.

I'd say those were two different moments. So I started the business in May 2011. By the end of 2012, we had licenses in enough states across the country to where we could market channels that did scale. And we had listened to customers in terms of like product feedback. They had in the early days where it wasn't perfect, still not perfect for that matter, but it was good enough to where it was a better alternative to other money transmission businesses out there. And I remember we turned on some national advertising for the holidays, which is a big time for a lot of Filipino customers sending money back home. And when we turned on that national advertising, there was some TV advertising and other channels. That's when we really started to see the hockey stick start to pick up. And that's when I was like, all right, we're on to something. But then we're about this 12 years in terms of how big it can be. I think we're just getting started. We're 2% of the remittance market, as I mentioned, we're just starting with broader financial services. And a phrase we say internally, remit means we're just getting started. And it still feels like that today more than ever. And people forget also I think in the entrepreneurial journey that it's a process. Businesses are not built overnight. Even look at companies like Amazon. Amazon's done what Amazon's done. They started in E commerce only and they started just with books to the focus point around indigestion versus starvation. And I think that for us it feels like we're just getting started because we're scratching the surface in terms of the vision we want to accomplish.

Now remitly has 4.2 million customers across 170 countries.

Yep.

What were the key strategies from doing things that don't scale in those early days that you did to now acquiring and retaining such a significant user base?

Yeah, so I mentioned one on the marketing front and that one definitely is. We went from more high touch interactions with customers really to get product feedback to much more national, very analytical, data driven marketing campaigns. So that is one. I think culture is an interesting one in terms of how it's always been there from the start. But how we've implemented that culture I think has evolved over time in terms of just scalability, hiring the right people, how we've evolved our values. I think how we stay close to customers has systematically changed. Like I mentioned, the non scalable joining like the Filipino Chamber of Commerce board versus the much more scalable approach we have now where we have everything from a research team to just it being viewed as everybody's job in the company to whether it's your customer support agent and they have the, I think closest, most insightful in many ways, interactions with our customers to how we make sure that our product managers, our engineers, everyone across the company is using the product and staying close to customers. So a scalable way that we've done that. As an example, the early days we were all on call like any customer support you might have gotten me because I was on call just like everybody else. Now obviously we have a huge customer support team, but how can we actually stay close to our product and the issues they're facing in an authentic way? We launched something called the Remitly Scholars program, which is part of our philanthropic work. But basically it's university students in the Philippines and we are paying for cohorts of students and we're paying for their tuition at a couple schools in the Philippines. And it would be easy to do that. And just like the company would pay for it instead of that, what we do is we pair remitly employees across the globe with what we call remitly scholars and we encourage them to use our product. It's where some of the best product feedback comes from because they're not using it in like a demo capacity. They're sending money back to their remitly scholar for tuition. And the improvements and the meaning their team drives from that is super important. Another scalable thing that we did to stay close to our customers and business is we offer a travel benefit such that if our team travels to one of the countries that we serve, it's now 170 as you mentioned. So it's a lot of places. Then we reimburse them. I think it's $1,000 for their trip. All we ask in exchange is they come back and they share insights based on their trip. Could be the culture, it could be how folks receive money. We ask them to use our product, use competitors products. So that's another thing that we've done. So it's those kind of programmatic things that we've had to implement to scale, but all again rooted in that the principles of customer mercentricity and some of the other cultural elements that I mentioned.

Anytime you have more than two people interacting that seems like very deliberate that you're sharing, you're sending and receiving. There is an inherent virality in that function. It's beautiful. So the more you encourage people to use the product to remit, it's spreading as a function of it. Now how would you approach building trust and credibility amongst customers, especially in a sector where there's so much scrutiny and reliability is crucial. Like going from that startup in the.

Early days, I think that a lot of the trust element actually ties to what you just said around. The word of mouth and trust and brand that we've now built I think does have a flywheel effect in terms of our customers then saying hey, this is a great service, you got to check it out and try it. If you take a step back though and think about how important trust is to our customer base, I think it's true in all financial services. But if you think about businesses like lending, where businesses are giving out money, our business, we're actually asking customers to give us their money we collected via bank account or a debit card and then trust us, deliver it thousands of miles away, oftentimes will be picked up in cash in an emerging market. And then you overlay what it's like to be one of our customers who might have moved to a new country might be a little bit more reticent to give a company their name, date of birth, address or tax ID and Social Security number in the US context, if they have one. Our customers are reticent to do that. And so trust is paramount and how we build it is I think a combination of that word of mouth that I talked about. But now we have a list of really effective marketing channels that we've rolled out. Whether it's digital marketing channels, social, Google properties et cetera to a wide range of other digital channels that help us a lot. And then we've increasingly started to do some pretty interesting things on the brand front. Where if you're in London and you're in a tube station that's in community where a lot of our customers live, you might see tube ads, things like that, or gotten more effective to reach our customers where they're at.

With 3,000 employees and 4.2 million customers across 170 countries, probably get ideas, a million an hour or something like that.

Right?

Everyone on ideas, everyone has ideas to grow. How do you prioritize what to build, what to develop? What is that framework for prioritization? It's very important to focus on.

Yeah, focus is key at any stage of a company that starts with that having a clear corporate strategy, having a clear product strategy and then having a clear technical architecture to accomplish that product strategy and then ultimately hiring the right leaders. It all comes down to team and culture. Because once that scaffolding is set, its leaders then need to be making the right trade offs around how we iterate towards accomplishing that strategy and vision. Being able to delegate to them in the right ways with the right scaffolding and corporate strategy and product strategy is how you actually scale a business. You're not going to make every product or resource trade off at a centralized level. You've got to get the right team that can make those trade offs themselves.

You know how I can tell two things. I don't even have to look at the market cap. I can just tell from your energy. I've talked to thousands of people on the pod. You get like 400 plus videos on YouTube. You can just tell from the energy if the founder is happy with the team or not. And I can get that energy.

It's funny because you talk to people, you sense a certain energy and then.

A few weeks later XYZ happens in the press. Like you can just sense from the energy or the company just freaking explodes. Right. So you can just tell.

So kudos to your team.

Kudos to you for finding the people. I think early days especially 50% of a founder's job is recruiting. So find the right people and make sure they're aligned with the vision mission. The job of a leader is to build, inspire and motivate a team to deliver. Deliver is the lagging indicator in that equation right now. Expanding to international markets because how do you pick which market to go first? Because what I see a lot is, you know, founders often start with one product, one market, one channel and they get to series B, series B rolls around, they get a whole bunch of cash and all of a sudden they're.

Like, oh, we need to new product.

We need new market, we need five new marketing channels. They go all over the place and bring themselves back into this indigestion mode. But you've stayed very disciplined. What is your rubric for scaling or like the process, the strategy? How do you figure out, okay, I'm going to go in Dubai versus I'm going to go in Africa.

Yeah. So we again took, I think, a counterintuitive but effective approach. For us, I think it was two to three years into the journey, we still were just in US, the Philippines. And to your point, you know, we'd raise additional capital, we're continuing to grow and scale. And what a lot of companies do is be like, all right, well let's go to 50 countries now what we did is we launched us to India and we did that for like a year. And then we launched us to Mexico and we did that for the year. Rough timelines on that. But now we're like three, four, five years into this 12 year journey where we're in three corridors. Corridors like a country pairing four countries total. And what that enabled us to do one was not have indigestion, to your point, because if we would have gone too broad, too quick, we wouldn't have gotten our risk product or our corridor expansion playbook done effectively or our disbursement network set up in the right way or payment acceptance. All these things that you have to get right before you scale. So when you do scale to your point about the scaffolding of a building, the scaffolding's right. You can build around it as opposed to scaling too quickly. It's really hard to ever go back and repair that scaffolding. And so focus, focus, focus was key to our success. And how we picked those markets back in the day did take founder led judgment. I actually think my co founder, Josh, that's one of his superpowers, like taking a wide range of facts and then making the right call. For anybody listening to these podcasts, there are people that are very good at that and that's a super important skill. As a co founding team, I'm actually not that good at it. And I'm not being self deprecating. I just think Josh, when you give him full context, he's going to make the right call. And we even pivoted a couple of times like we were on the road to launch Mexico. Second, we pivoted back to India because we learned, we iterated and we were a smaller company. So we had the courage and Josh had the courage and directness to say, no, we're pivoting back, here's the reasons why and we're going to do India second. So surround yourself with people like that. Now, as you'd hope with a company, our stage in size, it's a little bit more dispersed. So we have a whole just, you know, global expansion team that is very scientific and very specialized in terms of the criteria that they use to launch new markets and then the work back plan to launch those markets in the right order that will ultimately help serve our customers in the right way, in the right places.

What were your top three challenges and how did you navigate them?

Every business has complexities. Remittances, when you add in the regulatory complexities, the fraud, the compliance, the disbursement network, which takes partnerships. Getting a corporate bank account, there's a concept called de risking that banks basically don't want to give a money transmitter corporate bank account, especially in very small one that doesn't have a track record. That was just really hard. There were like so many existential moments. I'm going to go through two or three examples and then I'm going to tell you, I think the singular trait that did get us through those challenges. The second challenge that comes to mind is we've been very fortunate on the fundraising front over a lot of years. But what folks read is the headline like no fundraising. No fundraise has been like the super easy fundraise, especially in the private capital markets. Because I think that oftentimes for our business, there's questions around commoditization, race to the bottom. Until you really understand our customers, you understand trust being paramount and then you see our continued track record of delivery. But because that's a misconception, read the headlines as the output in terms of fundraising. But I can't tell you how many no's I got. And it's super hard when you're subscale because you need the capital to grow. You've got a team relying on. You've got customers relying on you. So some of those early fundraisers were difficult. And then the third is what got you here won't get you there. And it's most painful for me when it comes to people and talent because different skills are needed during different stages of the journey. And it is different skills. It's not like the role in my view outgrew them. It's just with the skills for a public company CFO versus like our very first cfo, just different. And so it's hard to manage through that because you care about these people, you love these individuals that are very committed to serving our customers and managing those kind of transitions with the kind of authenticity you respect. Continuous feedback, but in a way that's humble and authentic is super important to me and I think has been a difficult but important part of the journey. The thread that has been key to all three of those, especially the first two, is just tenacity, tenacity and grittiness. And perseverance, I think is an under rewarded and under recognized entrepreneurial trait. And it's this balance between tenacity of breaking through the walls you need to break through, but also flexibility around the actual solution you're trying to build. Because there needs to be that flexibility that's rooted ultimately in the customer problem you're trying to solve. But tenacity that is critical for any entrepreneurial journey and success. And I think that's what oftentimes separates the folks who are very successful versus folks who aren't able to get there. Come out of a lot of luck.

People don't realize luck is when hard work meets opportunity and meet good karma. Right. You become the collective of the good deeds and the goodwill you put out there. And luck happens. If we didn't do this deal during the boom times, I would be crying right now, sitting in San Francisco. I wouldn't be in Dubai. Right? There's a little bit of luck in everything. And I think the best thing you can do is just help enough people be kind and good things will happen. I genuinely believe that. Now I want to dive into your fundraising journey. What did that look like leading up to the ipo? How did you attract investors and secure funding to support the growth of the company?

We raised multiple private rounds before the ipo, which is probably even more applicable for most of your listeners. And it was hard. I think the way the fundraising game works is you get a lot of no's through the process. The investors that we really respected that said no, we stayed in touch with. And most of our fundraising rounds was led by an investor that passed on a previous round. And so it's this two way interview and dialogue that you're having with investors, which I think entrepreneurs can forget sometimes. But with that two way street, if you're an entrepreneur listening to this, you're talking with investors. Like some investors, you just feel like you click with. You feel like they added value even if they don't Invest. And a lot of investors, you're like, they didn't get our business. They said no. That was probably a blessing in disguise. And I don't really have the strong desire interest to listen to their advice or to stay in touch with them. But for those few that you do feel like give you great advice and you want to stay in touch with, take that humble approach, listen to their advice and play the long game. Because what happened with us is we deliver, we listen to the good advice and then we come back to those investors and be like, that was great advice. Here's how we've delivered based on it, and here's where the business is at now. And some of those investors challenge their preconceived notions about remittances, about why they may have passed, and then they end up leading our subsequent round. So that's been a big part of our journey. I'd advise that with folks that are out there fundraising and just have a lot of grit and a lot of tenacity and know that getting a lot of no's is part of the process.

It's hard though when you keep getting rejected. Right. How many rejections have you faced through the fundraising process?

Oh, truly countless. It's part of the journey. And now it's like I stay in touch with a lot of folks who said no and I have great relationships with them. It's a long journey, but yeah, lots of no's.

And how did you keep yourself motivated through all of that?

Oh, I know we're almost in time. I could talk much about mental health, about what I do on the mental health front, mental health challenges I faced. But there's a whole topic around taking care of my own mental health and physical health, which is part of that. Surrounding myself with really good people that can support me through the journey and then ultimately staying rooted in our customers vision what matter, because that's ultimately is what gives me the fuel to keep going every day.

Definitely. You know, I found surrounding myself with the right people, changing the environment, even like waking up and working out first thing, what do you do to stay in optimal or peak mental and physical performance? Especially the mind. Right. Building a company to 3,000 people, I can't even imagine what was the toughest, lowest point in your career and what did you do to cope with that?

I don't know if it was B, C or D. It was like we were big enough to have a sizable team. We're probably like 50 or 100 people. Fundraisers, super hard to get done. We needed capital Unlike now, where Q1 is the most recent financial performance we shared, but we were profitable on adjusted EBITDA basis. We have a very strong balance sheet. You go back to the Series C days, like we needed the capital and we were getting a lot of no's and there was a big enough team that was relying on us and a big enough customer base that it wasn't like we were three folks in a garage. And yet we also were five years away from the escape velocity we've gotten to now from a scalability standpoint that a lot of payments companies have. And that was really hard because you could see the Runway approaching and you could see all these no's coming. Brutal. That was one of the tougher moments. But one of our remitly values is lead authentically. So I've tried to be a little bit more authentic in terms of the mental health things I do. Certainly exercise is foundational for me, so I'm a big runner. The other elements are therapy has been really helpful for me and I'm really open about that. We also offer that to our team via tool called Modern Health. Team member and their dependents can get access to free therapy and coaching, which I think is super important. And to normalize therapy. Surrounding myself with people that are just great supporters, whether that's my families, co founders, folks, that I can be authentic in those darkest times with meditation's been helpful for me over the years. I'd like to say I do it as often as I should, but I'm a better person when I do. Like I use the Headspace app and meditate. That helps me a lot. Those are a few things that come to mind. We get up a whole separate session on that though. I think mental health for founders and mental health in the world we live in is so important to focus on.

Kudos to you, man, for offering these benefits for your employees. Mental health, especially in these times, the conversation around it needs to be normalized. I personally go and talk about it a lot on my LinkedIn. I talk about it a lot because at the end of the day, when a founder leaves a company, no matter how good the financial outcome, you built your identity around it. You got lost because you did nothing else but this. So at least for me, I felt lost. I hit rock bottom. Obviously I came into money, so I started behaving unhealthy. And then when I turned my life around and I wrote about it, dozens upon dozens of founders started reaching out to me. One was the founder of a series D mental health startup called me almost in tears saying, listen, I'm really lost. I don't know what to do. I feel like an imposter. And I realized, man, if you can't speak about this with your board and your execs or your closest people, then this is a path to face planning and potentially worse outcomes.

Yeah.

So it's really important to normalize this conversation. Kudos to you for encouraging this in the workplace. If you treat your employees, your people with love and help them grow, they'll treat your business with love and your business will grow.

So yeah, kudos to you and I have loved your post on this topic around your health journey and mental. It's awesome. So thanks for your authenticity and if I can ever help amplify or do anything on that front, we share a similar passion for that. It's awesome.

Now, as you look forward, what are some things in your future growth, future vision that you're most excited about?

Like I said, the vision's all around really improving the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services on the planet. And we're 2% of the remittance market. So as we say we're just getting started there. We're focused on complementary products to remittances because we know our customers have other pain points that we can help them with. And we talked about the scale, the size and the ability that gives us to provide a more trusted and differentiated product. It's just a really exciting time. And so I'm super excited about what we can do in the coming years in terms of growing our business and remittances, growing our business when it comes to complimentary products and services and ultimately just like having a hugely positive impact on our customers lives. Like the stories I get from customers and I always say remittances are always important, but they're especially important in times of crisis. Whether that was the global pandemic that we went through and funds being used for emergency medical expenses, whether that's a natural disaster, whether that is depreciating currencies and financial crises in some of the markets that we send money to and therefore money making it money going even further to families that our customers are sending money to. I'm just super excited about that impact because people say it can change the world. It sounds cliche, but this is one of those businesses. It's $1.6 trillion that's sent every year between family members. Largely that's just this huge force for good. And we're just getting started in terms of being able to make that impact.

What's one piece of unconventional advice that founders ignore but shouldn't?

I think it's a theme we talked about, but focus.

May make you grow.

Slower in the short term, but it will supercharge your growth in the long term and it will decrease your risk of failure. So focus is the underappreciated nutrient of long term successful companies.

Focus also lifts your messaging, your conversion. When you try to be a mile wide and an inch deep, the messaging doesn't get across. So I'm so glad that you've been on point with your focus through 3,000 employees and you're saying you still only have 2% of the market. So there's a long way to go. A lot of people start slapping products and products and products and go wider and wider. This is a true strategy for long term sustainable growth. Where can we follow your wisdom?

You can follow me on Twitter, follow me on LinkedIn.

What are your handles?

It's Matopy O P P Y on Twitter and then it's just Matt Oppenheimer. If you find me on LinkedIn, you can follow me. And so those are the two best ways.

Thank you so much, Matt. It's been a wonderful conversation speaking with a friend in a living room. If we were in person, we'd probably go for a few hours, but I got to be respectful of your time. Wishing you great success. Another zero on that market. Cap, thanks so much.

Thanks Lloyd. Talk to you soon. I need some traction.

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