S7E7: Samir Vasavada of Vise on Building a Fintech Unicorn and the Future of Investing

We'd had this meeting and it ended with, hey, look, we think you guys are smart kids, but we believe that ETFs are actually the future. You can see it. What you're doing basically is like not important. The industry expert opinion can change. What you're doing is going to be the future. Assume the industry is going to have to slowly start to change over time. And the way you validate that is by talking to the people that will actually use the product.

Welcome back to the 7th season of The Room Podcast. If you've been here for a while, you might remember Claudia and me have been on a journey to navigate our early 20s careers in Silicon Valley. We started this podcast about 2 years ago now, which is pretty wild, in the middle of a pandemic recording from our bedrooms. Since then, a lot has changed both in the macro economy as well as in our own jobs and careers. So let's get you up to date on what's going on with us. Since 2020, Claudia has left Uber and become a full-time co-CEO and founder of Pryve, a startup unlocking and disrupting recurring revenue for e-commerce brands.

And Madison is now a partner over seed investments at Defy VC, an early-stage venture firm in the Bay Area, totally crushing it. And I'm so lucky to have her as an investor in Pryve. We're two women navigating our careers and asking the people who inspire us to shed light on their stories. Unlocking Access starts with a conversation and context. We open the door to moments in technology history that traditionally happen behind closed doors. Mads, can you tell us what to look forward to this season?

Absolutely. This season, you can expect a really exciting 8-person roster of founders that you've definitely heard of. First up is Spencer Raskoff and his journey to building Zillow. Second, we have Kelsey Mallard and her vision for the future of primary care, which is being empowered by the Sitka platform. We also have a look into the future of the modern data stack with Kashish Gupta, where he's gonna share his belief in the need for reverse ETL amidst a backdrop of a lot of macroeconomic turmoil. Our guests are gonna bring you into the room where they're making important decisions on navigating a downturn. In real time. Claudia, where can people find more about our key themes and guests each week?

Great question, Mads. Every week we launch a newsletter and related resources alongside the episode that helps our listeners get tactical. We also post on Twitter, TikTok, Medium, LinkedIn, and more for special content every week. Definitely follow. If you're local to SF, hit us up. We have an exciting schedule of in-person events, fireside chats, and pop-ups where we would love to meet you. Okay. Well, sounds like we're ready to open the door to this week's room.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast.

We are so excited to share another inspiring conversation with the co-founder and CEO of Vyse, Samir Vasavada. Vyse is an AI-powered asset manager that enables financial advisors to build, manage, and explain personalized portfolios for their clients. Vise is on a mission to create financial freedom for all with a platform that allows investors regardless of age, net worth, or geography to access personalized, automated, and intelligent investments across all asset classes. Samir started with his co-founder Runic when they were just 16 years old. After giving advice to finance professionals through expert networks, Samir and Runic decided to bootstrap the company before raising $128 million from funds like Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and Blinc Capital. In this episode, we sit down with Samir and discuss topics such as advice for young or first-time founders, tips on fundraising and going to market, even navigating a pivot, and the mission of Vise and the future of fintech, particularly given the current market.

Thank you so much, Samir, for being on The Room today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Of course. Before we get into the story of Vise, we like to start at the beginning with our guests. Tell us, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. It has shaped my view of the world because like Cleveland's a very different place than I would say like New York or San Francisco or the big cities where we all live. Pretty humble. People aren't too motivated to do big things, but they're all very happy. So it's given me a little balance in life.

That's awesome. You certainly didn't take the traditional path, probably not the same teenage years as most of your peers in Cleveland. Prior to starting Vise, you and your co-founder Roonik consulted with financial institutions such as UBS, BCG, and many others on AI. This led to starting NYX Development, which built apps for small and medium businesses. How old were you when this all started?

It was actually the inverse. We started building apps first, and then that got us into consulting. We started when we were 12. We met at a summer program at Northwestern. Our parents are like, you need to go do college courses over the summer. You'll learn something. It's better than summer camp, which is what all your friends are doing. And Riddick's dorm was across from mine. There's not too much to do in Cleveland and he's from Detroit. So you're like, well, let's make some money. The thing to do back then and what was hot in 2013, 2014 was apps. Every small business wanted an app. Mobile phones were being adopted by everyone and apps were like the clear way to get distribution of your product or service. So we decided, what if we built an app development studio? We learned how to program and we started building apps for small and medium-sized businesses. The first app was actually for a conference. So a lot of conferences in the medical industry have thousands of attendees and they need to figure out their agenda and what the next event is and the breakout rooms, when lunch is. And we figured like a good way to do this is an app. And these conferences can tend to be pretty high budget. So they're okay spending tens of thousands on an app if it makes their attendees have a much better time. So it was like a unique angle for us. Not too many conferences had done it at the time. There was this big medical conference that my dad was actually involved in. He connected us with the organizer and we built them their first app. And for a professional web development studio, which we were not, a couple thousand dollars, it was like $10,000, wouldn't have been a lot of money. But for us, you know, 13, it was like, a billion dollars. Like, we didn't know what to do. We felt like we were so rich, and it was a great kickstart to the career.

That's incredible. So from apps to consulting, tell us about that transition.

There was actually a startup in the middle. My co-founder's this, like, math prodigy. He's brilliant. And he had been doing math research since 8 or 10 years old. And a professor at a very well-known university in the artificial intelligence computer science lab had reached out and said, hey, you've done all this math research. Can you help me on AI? Can you help do some AI research projects with me? And we realized that all these small businesses want the same types of apps. What if we built a platform where any small business, anyone can type in their app idea, we'll use AI, we'll use low/no-code, and we'll build them an app. And they don't need to know how to program. They don't need to have us as the app developer. Anyone can build an app. That was our first startup. It was an incredibly difficult technical challenge. AI at the time hadn't really evolved to where it is today. And we weren't equipped to solving that, but one of our advisors at the time was this former investment banker. He's like, look, you guys know so much about AI and machine learning. There are all these consulting opportunities with these large investment banks. You guys should start doing them. So we start consulting with investment banks through these expert consulting networks. You can literally sign up online and it will connect you to financial services institutions looking to learn about a particular area. And you could bill, and we were billing anywhere between $500 and $700 an hour. And we knew slightly more than they did, and we were pretty articulate and pretty well-spoken as we were talking about it. So we started educating these institutions on how machine learning works, how AI works, the broader industry trends. And that's what actually originally got us into finance, because what kept on coming up as we were talking about AI was wealth management. Because we were talking to these large financial institutions, the wealth management business was a huge portion of their revenues, and they were trying to understand how can we use AI to automate it? And we're like, this is a really interesting problem. Like, let's learn about it. And that was our first foray into finance and our first foray into consulting.

They probably didn't realize how young you guys were when they were getting your advice, but nonetheless, the content and the quality of it definitely proved to be useful. So that's just an incredible story.

We didn't know the whole 18 or under policy. No one ever asked us. There was a consulting project. The other end requested for a video conference and Riddick looks a little older than I do, so he could show off he was a little bit older, but he was doing it in a high school classroom right after school. Some freshmen walked in and were talking about like their homework or something, and the other end was like, how old are you? What's the story? A couple days later, we got a call from the general counsel, but that was the end of that.

Well, I guess the end of that led to another start. Tell us about the years or time in between being fired from this expert network to starting what is now Vise?

We originally started Vise with the intention of using AI to automate portfolio management for large institutions because we talked to all these large institutions as we were consulting. We understood that these large institutions had so much in terms of human interface as to how do they build and manage portfolios, back office, portfolio managers, fund administrators. It was just an incredibly complex process to building a rather generic portfolio for an individual client. And our viewpoint was, can we offer AI to basically build and manage portfolios? So we did that. We bootstrapped the company early on. The two of us just built the product ourselves. It was called FSAI, Financial Services Artificial Intelligence, before it was actually called Buys. And we were trying to sell it to big banks. So Jamie Dimon is speaking at Detroit Startup Week. And there's a school trip down to see Jamie Dimon speak at Detroit Startup Week. He gets off stage, like rushes him on stage and is like, hey, this is what we've worked on. This is what we've built. FSAI, like, can JP Morgan use it? We'll automate away all of your portfolio managers. And Jamie was like, I don't think JP Morgan's going to use it. We have all these internal tools. And I forgot what the exact story was, but he was like, you guys should look into independent advisors. Because the big trend in the space is that all these advisors are leaving big institutions. They're leaving Merrill Lynch, they're leaving Goldman Sachs, all the traditional wirehouses and going independent. And that trend is only growing. It's only getting bigger and bigger. And these independent advisors don't have any tools or technology, and you guys could create the operating system to how they build, manage, and explain their investment portfolios in a personalized way to their clients. And I'd actually talked to a family financial advisor, and he reaffirmed this trend. And the second big trend that really reaffirmed it was as we were seeing personalization take shape in all other aspects of our life, right? How we order food, how we consume content, how we shop. We hadn't seen it in how we invest, right? And investors, especially people like ourselves, want to see our values, want to see our individual preferences, want to see our goals, our beliefs reflected in our portfolios. And the investment tools, the investment methodology of yesterday, mutual funds, you know, ETF products, rather generic investment strategies weren't able to deliver that personalization that end investors are actually looking for.

When did you say, okay, we have this insight, there is a massive opportunity here to really disrupt how folks are investing, how individuals understand their wealth and what's going on with their assets and instead start this company, go down that path full-time, as opposed to considering going back to college or some of those other more traditional paths.

In order to do big things in the world, you need to just take blind, high conviction bets. Startups don't really make logical sense. They're not a rational thing to do. When you think about all of the different reasons why a startup won't succeed, there's very few reasons for a startup to succeed. There's thousands of reasons for a startup not to succeed. So the rational thing to do would have been to go to college, would have been to just get a job and like work into that. But the irrational kind of crazy thing to do is just take a blind high conviction bet and assume you're going to figure it out. So I'd love to say that there was some kind of strategy behind it or some reason why I did what I did. I knew that this is what I wanted to do. I knew that this industry was here to change, and even if I failed, I would learn a bunch. So I just decided I'm gonna drop out of school, I'm gonna move to San Francisco, and I'm gonna build the company, and I'm gonna try and do it with just the money I've made consulting. I'm gonna try and bootstrap it basically.

That certainly paid off. And here we are today talking about what is now Vise, but I'm just intrigued by this moment where you guys had a thesis and then you got feedback on that thesis from one of the most renowned men in the space, really. For those who were kind of in this early iteration phase of building and thinking through their idea, what advice would you have for them on getting that feedback, helping mature your idea from the insight to the actual product?

That's a great question. There's actually a counterexample to this, which is we're about 16 years old. There was a guy that one of us met who worked at a very high up at a very big investment bank. And we'd been bothering him for months. Hey, we want to set up a time with like you and the leadership team and talk to them about what we're working on and how AI is going to make a big difference and how personalization is the next step to investing. And we had talked to this large investment bank and we finally got the meeting. We like flew out to New York. It was awesome. 20 people in the room. We'd been preparing for months to run through this presentation about how the next step after mutual funds and ETFs was personalized portfolios, and that the traditional asset management industry as we know it would not exist in the same way in 10 years. So we'd gone through this pitch and it was all the people that would, so to speak, know a lot about the industry, the people that were like the industry experts and the people that were like the biggest stakeholders at this various institution that manages trillions of dollars in assets. So we'd had this meeting and it ended with, hey, look, we think you guys are smart kids, but we believe that ETFs are actually the future. You can see it. Commissions are still high. Investors don't wanna invest in individual stocks. What you're doing basically is like not important. My point is the industry expert opinion can change. You need to take a long-term, high consensus what you're doing is going to be the future and assume the industry is going to have to slowly start to change over time. And the way you validate that is by talking to the people that will actually use the product. So in our case, it was independent advisors. It was going direct to the advisors as opposed to the people that are legacy and sell to the advisors. So every single day after school, we would talk to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 advisors. I think I added it up. We had 300 or 400 phone conversations with financial advisors. Over a year and a half, 2-year period. And the way we thought about it was how can we understand the psychology of how these advisors think? What do they care about? How do they make decisions? Why do they make the decisions they do? And then how can we design a product that aligns to the psychology of their decision-making? It helped us build more and more conviction towards the product we're building, towards the industry we're trying to solve for. And it was a counter-conviction to everyone, all the naysayers, all the people that said, hey, this isn't going to work. So I guess my oversimplified advice is talk to the people that are actually going to use the product and understand what are their problems, how do they think, why do they make decisions? And if you were them, if you were in their shoes, how would this product or this solution that you're building solve for all of the different issues that they might have versus either expecting them to tell you we need it or relying on kind of third-party opinions.

I think that's incredible advice. Something that I'm going to internalize as well, especially even on the investment side, because it's really easy when you're not in the weeds, not talking to the end user, to oversimplify where a macro trend might be going. But at the end of the day, when you actually understand what problems exist and then where the existing solutions are not meeting those needs, and then how the technology confluence is going to be able to more rapidly evolve and innovate what is possible, that's magic. And that's what Vise is today. You're today a technology-powered asset management platform that uses AI, to help financial advisors build, manage, and explain their personalized portfolios to clients. You've talked a lot about how you're serving this end user, but would love to discuss more around the mission behind Vyze and what that early iteration of the product actually looked like.

It's funny because right before this I was looking at— we had our first version, the prototype we built 6, 7 years ago. and we recorded a video of it, and I was watching that video. It's pretty similar. There's a lot of differences, and obviously the product today is significantly better and works at a high quality, but it's relatively the same from a bones standpoint as the product we originally set out to build, which is crazy to us given how many different learnings that we've had as we've talked, had hundreds of conversations and hired all these people and understood the space and to see how it unwinds. But the product is relatively similar to when we had first built it. But if you step to the mission, which is I think what you're alluding to, it all comes down to one thing, which is how do you drive financial freedom for everyone and how do you level the playing field in some sense? So the same advice the ultra wealthy got, everyone now has access to. They have it in a personalized way, they have it in an automated way, and they understand the why behind their investments. So if you look back even 10, 15 years, the concept of a separately managed account, or to simplify it, personalized portfolio tailored to your needs. So you'd go to a big bank or a big wealth management institution. They would build you this tailored portfolio. A portfolio manager would oversee it, would review that portfolio. Was only available to clients $50 million plus, and then it became $10 million plus, and today it's $500,000 to $1 million plus. Vise is bringing a concept of a personalized portfolio to $10,000 plus, sometimes even smaller, right? So the same advice that the ultra-wealthy were limited to 10, 12 years ago, everyone now has access to. And we think that is going to drive a seismic shift in the industry because what retail predominantly had exposure to before was mutual funds and ETFs, which were generic investment vehicles. They weren't personalized to your individual needs as a client, will change to personalized portfolios of individual stocks.

Yeah, this idea of access, right?

Both access to information and then access to tools that allow you to action on that access and information. It's definitely something that's core to our thesis for the podcast is really believing that when you understand the technology behind what's happening and how you can empower people with better decision-making skills, maybe we change who's actually making the decisions or what it actually means for that person. And I love that that's core to what the original thesis for Vise was and how that's manifested today. But take us back to that moment where it sounds like you you moved early to San Francisco, you and Roonick working on this together. Who's the team? What's the energy behind this early moment in time?

Roonick had decided to go to college, and I was 16 when I moved from Cleveland to the Bay Area. I was out there for a couple years, 2 years. I was living in a hacker house, like straight outta Silicon Valley. So there's 12 of us. We were all sharing one bathroom. It was called the Crypto Castle. And It was a really unique learning experience. It was my experience to a college dorm, but then Roonick had decided to go to Penn. He came from a family that was very traditional and they'd said, hey, you have to go to college. And the plan was him to drop out, move to San Francisco and work on the business with me. But in reality, it was, he decided to go to college and I was like, I'm screwed. Like my co-founder's going to college. I don't know what else I'm going to do. And we were running out of money. We had a handful of employees. You asked about the team. We had a handful of employees that we had met online. That were former financial advisors or former software engineers or quants that were helping us build the product nights and weekends for free on equity. And, you know, some of them actually ended up working full-time and that was our team, but they started asking for salaries and it was looking like the end. We decided, so I think it was like February of 2018, we're like, okay, at the end of the year, if we don't raise money or get some traction, we'll throw in the towel. I was like, I'm going to move into Riddick's dorm room and I'm going to just live with him and we're going to try and build this business. We'll figure it out. We knocked on like 100 investors' doors and everyone had said no. We ended up meeting these two guys, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who were the founders of Flatiron Health. They gave us our first $100K and then that kickstarted off our initial seed round. Ben Ling, who we share in common, I guess, as an investor, co-led a seed round with Founders Fund. And we moved the company back to San Francisco. I got Riddick to finally drop outta school. He said he was only gonna take a leave of absence for a year. We ended up keeping him for much longer than that. Wow.

That's pretty incredible. And tenacity truly wins the day in this case. I'm just chuckling at this vision of you sleeping on a pullout couch or even like an air mattress on the floor.

It wasn't, it was actually, it's really funny. It was a, so Riddick's mom got him a mattress topper because the mattresses at UPenn were really hard. And it was a 3-inch thick mattress topper. We took the mattress topper off and just put it on the floor and we got like a sheet and we had an extra pillow. That was the bed.

We couldn't even afford an air mattress at this time. We were in mattress topper territory.

Yeah, exactly. I had like $900 in my bank account at this point, so I was like, I can spend it on food. We would go to Wawa every day, which is like the convenience store. Get these like nice Italian subs. Literally eat those every single day. Stay up till 2, 3 in the morning working, and Wawa stayed open really late, so we would always go to Wawa at 3 in the morning. And then that was the night, it was every single night.

Well, you come a long way to what is now unicorn status. So first of all, congratulations on your recent round that you announced a few months back for your Series C. That's incredible to see the journey from this to where you are today. Talk just a little bit about for those who are banging their head against the wall, thinking about their fundraising journey, how did you and Roonik manage through that resilience of actually convincing people on Sand Hill to take your capital beyond some of those first investors you mentioned?

It was hard, and I actually changed my opinion on this, which is raising too much capital isn't actually a good thing because when we first set out, there was this crazy hysteria the last 20, like 2020, 2021 with the pandemic, all the capital available in the markets, but everyone was raising tons of money at super high prices. And I think when you're not in this position of desperation or when you are fat and happy, right? Which a lot of startups, a lot of growth stage startups were over the last kind of year or two, you start to focus on the wrong things. You start to focus on scaling your team, on becoming a fancy company instead of customers and product. And when your back is against the wall, when you have 6 months of runway or a year of runway, you've got a small team that's super in it. They're the ones driving all the progress. That is when the most gets done. That is when the biggest breakthroughs in the company happen. And I would say that to all of the people, all the founders, like early-stage founders who are like looking at big fancy unicorns saying, oh, I wanna be that. I want to raise all of this money. It's going to push my business so far ahead. I actually disagree with that. I think it actually leads to behavior of like financial inefficiency and overspending, and it doesn't push your business forward. If you're building a true software business in this particular case, efficiency should be at the core of how you think about your business. And you should be able to do that with as little money and as small of a team as possible, as opposed to raising lots and lots of money. It's important to get the right early partners. And to have that person, like the Silicon Valley kind of stereotypical standstill VCs, it's important to find the right few of them. And that means not necessarily just pitching until someone gives you money, but like finding the right person that understands your business, that knows that it's going to take a long time to build, that knows that it's going to be a really hard journey is more important, I would say, than raising a lot of money at a really high price.

That really resonates, especially in today's current, like fundraising environment. It's funny, all of the friends and acquaintances that I know who have raised venture capital It always seems like they have their biggest aha moments are always at that 6 to 4 months remainder and runway where they actually figure stuff out and when they're actually making that progress, despite whether they raised $5 million as a pre-seed or one. And so I think there's a lot of truth to that back against the wall kind of position that companies are put in. And I think what you're mentioning is really refreshing, especially during this current climate where companies, even at the earliest stages, have to focus on being nimble as opposed to raising as much as they possibly can, hiring 100 people within their first 6 months. And we've seen a lot of downfalls of companies who followed that path. I'm curious, you've mentioned a lot in kind of those early moments, going to Wawa at 3 in the morning, thinking that things weren't going to happen. What advice would you give to companies who are in that pressure cooker, running out of money, they need to figure something out? Space? How do you advise companies on managing, or at least the founders, on managing that pressure? And what are some tactical things businesses can do to push through those hard times?

That's a great question. So the first thing is you are the average of the people that you spend the most time with. And if you've got a team that isn't in it with you, you've got people, they might be really good, but they're negative. They come to work every day, they complain, they're upset, they're not like in it with you. They're not trying to solve the problem. Like, it might be the hard thing to do. You might have to take on more work, but you should tell them to move on because in order to get through the next stage, you need to be a team. You need to operate with people that are acting as like team members, right? So oftentimes being a really big team, managing a lot of people, managing a lot of emotions, managing a lot of expectations is very difficult to do. Especially during times of extreme pressure. So you should be the size that is gonna get you through the problem, and they're in it with you. They're loyal, they're believing in the mission. That's what gets people through some of these hard times, being surrounded by the right people and separating themselves from the people that are not the right people, even though it's hard. And when you have that feeling that someone isn't right, you should just move on. You're not gonna re— you're not gonna regret it. I would say that's probably the most important piece. The next is to understand what is your North Star? Like, what are you trying to head towards? Are you trying to survive just for the sake of survival, or does your business actually not work? Do you actually believe in your business? Do you actually believe that it can go somewhere, or do you believe that you just want to survive for the sake of surviving because it's the only thing you can do, and without this, you wouldn't have anything? If there truly isn't a business here, like there's truly poor economics or customers don't want it. Or whatever it might be, you should move on. And that's a hard thing to realize as a founder, but like talking to the right people, having the right support system around you, the right group of people that understand your business just as well as you do will help you better come to that decision. The last piece I would say is just cut unnecessary distractions. Focus isn't just about focusing and not doing certain things that are bad, like spending less time going out or doing other things that you could theoretically say are not focused or not the main thing, but it's actually, there's things that seem like good ideas that aren't necessarily the main thing you need to win. There's usually only one or two things you need to really win and other things that seem like good things, but they're actually a wolf in sheep's clothing are things that you should avoid. An example of this is if your business is really struggling, with go-to-market, right? And let's call it like inbound sales. Some of your tech is broken or it's just working, but you have all these feature ideas you want to work on. They seem like good things to do. You should just forget about that. Let it break. Focus on it later, even though it seems like the right thing, the good thing to do, and focus all of your energy, all of your organization's energy, everyone's energy on just solving the inbound go-to-market issue. How do you drive more ads? How do you get more clicks? How do you figure out a scrappy way to drive more income, even though there's plenty of other things that seem like great ideas or other things you should be working on. Like true focus is saying no to the good things.

Sober advice, being able to sit in the chaos and focus on that one needle mover. It's actually a perfect transition. You mentioned go-to-market strategy and figuring that out as a hypothetical, but today Vise is over $250 million in assets under management. Tell us about that early go-to-market strategy that led to the scale beyond the 200 to 300 asset managers that you were speaking to after school when you're in high school.

Vice went from $0 in assets under management in the end of 2020, almost zero, to half a billion by middle of 2021. It was unprecedented growth this industry's ever seen. But what started to happen was our software started to break. There were just like issues we were finding internally with how we were scaling, and there's a lot of customer feedback, like it was working, but there were just clear things that we needed to work on. So we actually made a decision that we knew was going to be the right long-term decision. And this is right after we raised a lot of money, expectations were high, everyone is expecting us to grow. We decided we're going to stop growing. We're going to turn the sales machine off. We're going to keep our existing assets and we're going to go on a, hopefully a 6-month process to rebuild the entire piece of software, the entire stack. Iterate on all of our customers' feedback and push growth starting this year, which ideally wasn't the best time given the recession, but start growing again this year, knowing that our product will scale us for the next decade. Whereas the previous startup, previous product couldn't scale us for the next decade. It could scale us for the next year or so, but we'd have to eventually make this change. We're going to swallow the tough pill now. This is a hard, very controversial decision. And typically I would say to most founders, make the decision where you're incrementally building on top of your product versus doing one big rock like we did here. But we knew that it was the right long-term decision despite all of the short-term pain. That's what brought us almost to this point, but it was a hard decision we had to make.

Thank you for sharing the rawness of strategic decisions that need to be made and how similar to you just even starting Vise at the beginning, how you need to just fire off a cannon from time to time, and ultimately that is the right decision. I'd love to focus a little bit on the fact that you are leveraging tech to empower humans as opposed to replacing them by automating an industry that is in fact very old. As you're scaling, as you're pursuing your go-to-market strategy, what roadblocks have you faced in this mission by virtue of disrupting such an old sector?

Roadblocks after roadblocks. It's an incredibly hard space. It isn't one where they've adopted technology historically, and it isn't one where they adopt technology fast. It's one of the biggest markets in the world. Financial advisors manage in excess of $80 trillion. It's huge, but most advisors are relatively slow moving. And what we had thought going into this business was if we build the best product, and I have pretty high conviction we have the best product, everyone's going to just love it. That's what Silicon Valley trains you. They train you that if you build the best product, everyone comes. And I think in tech that's true. Figma's better than every design software. They didn't have to spend a lot of time on sales. Everyone just started using Figma because it was consensus the best design software, or Stripe with payments. It was just consensus the best. But in the advisory space, it isn't that. It's who has the relationship with the vendor. How close does the advisor have a relationship with wholesaler at the mutual fund company, the sales rep at the large asset manager? Are they taking him out to golf or taking him out to a restaurant he really likes? It's such a relationship-driven industry that it took us a little while to really understand that. It's part of the mission behind Vyse, which is we believe that the relationship that financial advisors have with their end clients is why they will never be replaced and why it's our job to use technology to empower them. Technology in some sense to fight technology because that relationship they have with their clients is so powerful. But it's also in the inverse, which is advisors care about the relationships they have with their vendors, with their tools. So what we've realized about this business is it's going to take a long time to build. It's not going to be an immediate classical definition hypergrowth business where you grow from zero to hero overnight. It's going to be a business where, you know, you're consistently growing and growing over time.

Thanks for sharing that. I think given the current economic environment and just some recent activities that have been happening in the market, I'd love to double-click into a very surprising announcement a few short months ago surrounding the Wealthfront acquisition by UBS. Tell us, given everything we've spoken about, what do you think of this almost transaction?

This would've been a smart transaction for both UBS and Wealthfront. The reason why the transaction fell apart is as soon as the market took a hit, UBS realized very quickly that the price they were paying compared to the multiples adjusted in the rest of the space was just way too high. It was a $1.4 billion deal as it was announced. It was actually a $700 million purchase price and then $700 million of team incentives over some performance and period of time, but they still felt that was too high of a price to pay given the market reset. So that's why they exited the deal. I think for them, the reason why they did the deal in the first place wasn't necessarily about the technology, but it was about the distribution Wealthfront had to millennial Gen Z clients that are going to start to grow over time. And I think it's why Robinhood and SoFi and some of these other assets are going to be really important to the traditional incumbents. Because they're going to eventually, and it might not be now, but it might be over the next 5 to 10 years, realize that they need, like, in order to future-proof their business, in order to survive, they need distribution to those types of institutions, to those types of customers, and they're not going to get it on their own through their own go-to-market. The challenge is that the cultures are very different between Wealthfront per se and UBS and a lot of these fintechs and these traditional incumbents or these traditional organizations. That's like oil and water a little bit, but it's also one where these traditional incumbents have so much scale. They have so many different resources. They have just so much right now. And it is a melting ice cube, but it's a very, very big ice cube that it's going to be hard for fintechs to compete with them because fintechs are looking at super high switching costs. They're looking at super high customer acquisition costs. It's very inefficient of a business. It's incredibly expensive, and there hasn't really been too many inspiring outcomes in consumer fintech, especially as you look at like the most kind of recent trend of IPOs, with the exception of maybe like a new bank that is going to require a lot of consolidation in the space.

So we're painting a picture of what consumer fintech looks like over the next 1 to 2 years. Let's zoom in a little bit more on asset management. How do you think that sector of investing is going to evolve as we head into a market downturn and over the next couple of years?

It's going to evolve in a lot of meaningful ways. I think there's going to be more access. So there's going to be more fintech platforms like Vise that are also leveraged by the institutions that are going to provide access to alternatives, to crypto, to other types of investments, which I think is going to be a net good thing for all investors. I think there's also going to be a huge amount of fee compression because what technology does is it drives scale and it drives the ability for large institutions to start to compete the fees because margins increase. So you're going to start to see traditional fees that, you know, might have been 1% that are now 20 basis points dropped to 5 basis points. And there's going to be continuously squeezing from the fee standpoint. So it's going to be harder to build a really great business in this space. In addition, you're going to see a lot of the old world mutual fund companies or old world investment managers start to die out over the next decade or so. They're either not going to have evolved their business to personalization, personalized portfolios, the direction the industry's heading, or they're just going to see outflows that are so significant and all start to consolidate with each other into the big asset managers. So I think the big asset managers, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, BlackRock, they're all going to get significantly larger and there's going to be a lot of consolidation with all those small and mid-sized firms.

I'll have to have you on in 5 years to gut check these predictions. But I am sure that you are looking at an incredible amount of data and have an inordinate amount of access to the information for these predictions. And I'm super intrigued by what you're sharing just for what it means for the end user, right? We talked about the financial advisors as being your core ICP and how you got started with Vise. But at the end of the day, you're servicing individuals who are leveraging these experiences and these platforms to help manage their personal wealth.

For sure. I mean, the end user is going to benefit. That's what I'm most excited about in the space is that for so long, these people have been screwed over every which way by financial institutions. They've been put in bad investment products, expensive investment products, expensive accounts. They haven't been delivered the service they need, but by both delivering advisors the ability to service more types of clients, not just ultra-wealthy clients, but also just democratize access to the best investment tools, the end consumer is gonna win in the end.

We're excited for that future as well. Speaking of futures, Samir, you have been at this for a few years now, have a few accomplishments under your belt, like Forbes 30 Under 30 last year. Congratulations. An exciting update on the fundraising for Vyse. But we're curious, what's up next for you personally?

It's funny, I think about all of these things as like noise, like it's great, but like at the end of the day, there's only one thing that really matters, which is the mission, the quality of the product. How are you servicing the customers? Everything else is great. It's not really worth focusing on for me. Success looks like having a big impact on this industry, like a really meaningful impact on this industry over the next decade. Like I would've been able to look back at 30 years and say, I drove the trend. Towards, this seismic shift in this industry. That's what the future looks like. That's what success looks like. And like just continuing to learn, make mistakes, grow. That is success to me.

That's all we can ask for. Continue to grow and learn and hopefully do it alongside some people that bring us energy. And you've mentioned a few of those people today, your co-founder, some early believers in you. But we ask this question of everyone on our podcast and we're curious who it is for you. And that is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

So excluding my mom, 'cause I love my mom, I would say the most profound impact a woman had had on my life was actually my best friend Zach's mom. And Zach's mom was on Wall Street for a number of years. She actually predicted the housing crash. So I think The Big Short was based on her. She's one of the most successful housing analysts of all time, like a Hall of Fame analyst. And they relocated back to Cleveland and Zach and I went to school together and I spent a lot of time like learning about finance, learning about the markets, learning about economics from her. And she was like one of the early foundational elements to my passion and excitement for the space. And she still has been today. So like we spend all kinds of time together and she knows all about the space and helps keep me updated on the markets. I think that was probably the most profound impact.

We'll have to send this to her so that she knows how much of an impact her learnings and wisdoms that she's passed along has impacted you and what is now Vise. So thank you, Samir, for coming on today to share a bit about your story, the vision for the future that you have for asset management, and taking the time.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for having me. Really enjoyed it.