#79 with Alexa von Tobel - From Dropping Out of Business School to a $375M Exit

Alexa, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. So we have a special guest. I'll let you do your intro because I really am terrible at introductions. But for those who don't know, what was LearnVest? Give us kind of like your, your maybe 2 or 3 minute background so that people know who you are.

Wow. Impressive. You're not in New York City right now, I see. Are you? I see greenery.

No, I'm not. I wish. No. So I have been in Florida. I'm actually sitting in my high school bedroom, which is bringing it all back full circle. Where we came. We came down here for spring break and just haven't gone back.

Do you have like a Justin Timberlake poster on the wall or something? Or what's in the high school room?

No, but it's amazing. Look at this. My mom has literally kept all of the things. And some days I'm like, Mom, why didn't you throw some of this stuff away? But she kept all my pictures and all my artwork and all my silly stuff.

So I'll start because Sam's probably still blown away. He loves Harvard. You had him at Harvard, then you sold a company for $375 million, and then financial planning. He's a total financial planning nerd, personal finance nerd. So Sam, do you need a moment to just sort of gather your thoughts, or are you ready to go?

No, he's joking a little. I, uh, I did not go to Harvard. I wish, but I, I do have an odd fascination with it. I— people say I have a Harvard sweatshirt. People always say, oh, you went to Harvard? I was like, yeah, I went there. I paid money and took a tour and they took me around.

Um, well, I will just say, uh, while Harvard was a great education, I think there's lots of things in life that are much cooler than Harvard. Uh, so excited to be here.

Did you say you dropped out?

I did. So I graduated undergrad and then I dropped out of Harvard Business School.

Okay, gotcha. And you said you studied happiness. Uh, like, what's that, like one class? Like, I took a class called Getting Rich and— but I, you know, that wasn't like my major, it was just one class.

So I actually, I studied psychology. I started in a track called Mind, Brain, Behavior and then ended up in psychology. And specifically, there was a happiness lab that Dan Gilbert was running where we focused on like how people make decisions, what makes us happy. And basically the headline of the whole, you know, my whole experience was we're really bad about making decisions that make us happy. We do things that we think will make us happy, but in fact, like getting the fancy car doesn't make you happy because then you have to clean the car or getting a bigger home out of the city doesn't have, you know, necessarily make you happy because then you commute farther to your work. So it was just really, really, I think, a good perspective of, um, it's the little things that really make us happy.

I love that. You know, uh, this is very on topic. So, so I remember back in the day there's a guy who was, I think, a professor at Harvard named Shawn Achor. Is that somebody who was—

that was— he was, uh, he was one of my teachers, Shawn Achor. Um, yeah, he's wonderful. And actually, um, his Court Professor Tal Ben-Shahar and Philip Stone were my thesis advisors.

So he gave this TED Talk that's pretty great. I still remember it and I watched this thing like 10 years ago. That's kind of, you know, some talks just stick with you. And it was called that, I think, The Happiness Advantage or the sort of something like that. And if I remember correctly, the thesis was being happy is actually an advantage to getting great results. Some people think about it the other way, like if a great thing happens, then I'll be happy. And his advice, what I remember from 10 years ago was, if I am happy, I'll have better results. Is that a good— am I accurate or am I just totally misremembering?

I mean, I totally agree with you. And beyond— not only do I totally agree with you, I also think it's worth saying that it is a skill that we can all adopt, right? Like just trying to have a positive outlook is something, you know, I can't grow taller or I can't get better at, um, you know, a certain trait that I just don't have. But, um, trying to be positive and trying to, to, to be joyful, I think actually it's something we can all put on. It may not be easy for everybody to do it, but it is possible.

Sam, are you an enthusiastic guy?

Uh, I think I am. I think that's why people like this podcast. So we have a very loyal audience, and I think it's because people feel as though Sean and I have a little bit of a contagious energy. And yeah, it is, it is positivity or it's very positive. But I think some of my coworkers will say that I'm kind of grumpy because I've got to be the bad guy. Unfortunately, a lot of times that I'm pretty blunt.

I think you have like an angry enthusiasm. Uh, you flip your switch, flips from like extreme enthusiasm and it's super infectious to like quickly very angry or grumpy about something. And then you switch back sort of effortlessly, but for the people around you, they're probably just getting rocked by it.

Yeah. I like, maybe you were like this, but like I will fight with my like executives at my company, but then I can, we can just hug it. We're good. We're good. But I'm definitely like that. Can we talk about LearnVest a little bit? So I used you, I used you guys when you first came out. What was the premise behind the business? Because I think it kind of pivoted a fair once or twice, right?

So I don't know if you know about my business. We're hosting this podcast, it's called The Hustle. It's content as well. And we're also building tools. So I'm very familiar with the content game and this strategy. I think it's great, but most people fail at it. I think it's quite hard. How long did it take to go from content to creating your products?

How many employees did you have, uh, like in the first 2 years or so to build all that?

Uh, so we were small in the beginning, you know, we got to about 50 employees by, call it the first real, like 2 to 3 years up and running. And by the time we got acquired, we were about 150 people, which, um, you know, we were a real business. And so that for me meant just like so much personal growth, so much, you know, being a young entrepreneur, you don't know what you don't know. And so it seemed really big to me at times.

So how, how big was the audience before you started launching those, the products and the advice? So how— because you're what I'll call an audience-first company, which is first build it through content, loyalty. And then when you have a service to offer or a product or tool to offer, you've got your customers sitting there, you just need to convert X% of them. So how big was the audience?

By the time that we got acquired, we were about 2.5 million users.

What's a user?

It was somebody who had signed up for— to make an account.

Wow, that's a ton.

And this is before Facebook too.

So Mark Zuckerberg went to college undergrad with me. I was his same classmate. And so Facebook definitely existed before I was starting LearnVest. But I, you know, 2007, 2008, when I was starting the idea, Facebook, I think was founded in like 2004. '04. So it existed, but it was very much, you know, you weren't building your business on Facebook at that time, right?

That's, that's what I meant.

So hold on, you were at Harvard when he launched Facebook at Harvard?

Yeah, I was his like same classmate.

Well, what was that like? Do you remember when you heard about Facebook?

Do we remember? Are you kidding? You like could never have forgotten. Um, you know, I remember at actually at the end of your, uh, username, what would be the number of Facebook user you were, and I was like in the hundreds. Um, so I was like roughly around 150. Uh, and you knew it because it was just the most helpful thing on the planet. It'd be like, oh, what's that person's name again? I can look them up. Um, and I always joked with my husband, when my husband asked me out, I like couldn't look up who he was yet. He'd asked me out before Facebook existed. And I remember being like, oh, I can't remember who he is. Like, is it this guy or that guy? And it just like My kids will never know a world where you like can't look somebody up. I mean, it's just, it's really powerful.

So did you think at that time it's going to be, this is going to be a big deal? Or were you like, this is useful for Harvard?

And I mean, like, could you foresee that it was going to be like a $75 billion company? Um, you know, I, I can't take credit for having like something that was that kind of crystal ball-ish, but you knew it was a big deal. Um, really quickly you could just tell. It was like the amount of time you were spending on it, how quickly it was spreading.— when it went to other colleges and you could look up your friends at those schools, when you could poke people. I mean, it was, you know, to the credit of Mark, it was an incredibly infectious platform.

And did you know him personally or no?

So I didn't know him when we were in undergrad. I met him a handful of times and I know his family and his siblings pretty well. But no, when he was starting at undergrad, I did not know him.

And did you think about joining when it was— it's like, hey, this thing is kind of taken off. I'm a student at Harvard. You were thinking about drop— you know, you dropped out of business school anyways to start a business.

I actually was thinking at that time of dropping out of Harvard to start LearnVest, basically. So my mom convinced me to graduate. I said to her, I want to go start a company. I know I need to. Um, and my mom was like, can you just graduate, pretty please? I'd gotten into Harvard Business School, and my mom was like, can you at least graduate from college. And to my mom's credit, I did. I'm glad I did. But that itch to go start something was like pretty alive. And to the credit of like a Mark Zuckerberg, when you are so close to seeing businesses get built, I think they called it the Facebook effect, which is when you can see how powerful the internet can be. And if you're a hardworking person who has skills, you're like, huh, maybe I should go do something. So yes, and I will definitely say I think Facebook spawned an entire, uh, you know, set of entrepreneurs.

And then you got— you said you got acquired when you guys had, um, I forgot how many, but I've read a blog post where— which was like, hey, LearnVest gets acquired for whatever, hundreds of millions of dollars. And it seemed to me when I was doing my kind of back-of-the-envelope math, I was like, so they were doing sort of like— this is my, my math showed me you guys were doing like less than $10 million in revenue and got acquired for, you said, $375 million. That's a huge multiple. So, first, am I— did I just— did I lose a zero somewhere? And then secondly, why did you get such a big outcome?

So I, I want to come back to— you were saying that you're talking to people who are building similar tools. I want to come back to that in a second, but I have two questions for you. Um, were you profitable when you guys sold?

So why, why raise so much? If you had just raised $30 million, you had $45 million in the bank, that means you had some like $10 or $15 million when you raised your last round. And if you're making good revenue, why raise in the first place? And also why sell?

So then did— it does make sense. And so did the company, uh, Northwestern Mutual, did they acquire you valuation based off of how many customers you currently had, or did they just say, ah, that's a, we don't really, you know, this is a behemoth of a company. We don't really care about your users, but what we wanna do is just take what you built and plug it in on our backend.

Yeah. I mean, I think, and again, I can't speak for how they valued the company exactly. I wasn't part of those conversations on the backend, but I think that what they viewed it as was they'll say that there were 3 really powerful things. The first was an incredible software that they could plug in that could go to their customers. The second was our entire platform. And if you go in northwesternmutual.com, you know, today, it was effectively LearnVest. We just moved over the tech stack, made it so you could log in, see your finances, use a lot of the tools. We launched their mobile apps, everything leveraging all of that.

When they offered, were you just like, hell yeah, in? Or because you had just raised, I mean, and if you said yourself, it sounds It sounds like you had a, it was a slog a little bit if I'm kind of reading between the lines. Like you're like, oh my God, it's 40 users a day. Like this is really freaking hard. Where, and they offer you that where you're like, yup. And, or what was that like?

What do you, what do you regret about that journey? I mean, would you take back selling or are you happy with that? Would you take back raising all that money or are you happy with that?

Is there anything that you, you're like, ah, I really, I don't regret a single thing. I have to say, you know, personally I got to grow a lot through it. Most times when a startup CEO gets acquired, they like sneak out the back door as quickly as they can. And I cared deeply that by the end of it, that I wanted to make sure they felt great and I wanted to feel like I had done what I said I was going to do. And so I ended up staying 4 years because I had such a good time. And I think that that speaks volumes to North Berkshire Mutual, which again, I was chatting with a few friends who sold their business in the last week and they were like, how did you stay 4 years? And I'm like, I loved it. And that doesn't mean there weren't hard days. There were brutal days. There were really hard days. You know, we shut down the LearnBest brand at one point because it really made more sense for it to live on the parent company. Because the parent had been around for 163 years and LearnBest was a tiny little brand. And, you know, I was proud of that decision also because it was the right one for what we promised that we were going to do.

So what are you, what are you looking at now? So you invest now, you got a fund, Inspired Capital. What spaces are interesting to you nowadays?

So, so Inspired Capital, we're an early-stage fund, so seed, Series A. We're totally generalist. We're literally looking right now at everything from restaurant tech, so food tech, which is really interesting. It's a mix of fintech and sourcing of any type of food that we will all eat from straight to agriculture, you know, farms to your coffee shops that we're pretty excited about. We're really focused on the future of money movement and there's some really cool things we're working on there. We just invested in a company in the trucking logistics space space, which we think and hope can put lots of people to work. And so, you know, really focusing on what is the next decade going to look like. We actually published today a future of work study. And I heard this great quote. We basically started the year in 2020 and we're ending this year 2030, just in how much we have just advanced the ball on who, how, and who we all are and how we will think. And, you know, being a working mom, how amazing is it that I can actually excel at my job, truly excel, and actually see my kids probably an hour and a half to two to per day more. I mean, it's just, it's, I will say, I think we're living through one of the biggest seismic shifts on our planet right now, ever, maybe the probably biggest in my lifetime. The global health world is collaborating in ways that you've never seen because we are all focused on a common enemy of COVID And I just think the world is incredibly exciting. And I will say, when you see asymmetric dislocation like we see right now, because the world is on on its tilt. That's when innovators go nuts. And this is like my favorite thing. I talk to 10 entrepreneurs a day. And as you can tell, I'm honestly just a junkie for founders. I love building businesses. My brain loves nothing more than hard problem solving. And I was just saying to a founder before this, you know, companies have seasons, right? You have spring, summer, fall, and winter. Winter sucks, right? And as I just said, I had plenty of winters at LearnVest. Summer is when it's fun and things are exciting. And I like to say that, you know, the Inspired Capital team, we are our best when it's winter. And for a lot of businesses right now, this is a winter. It's a scary time. And so this is when we want to be the best teammates.

You were talking about future of work and you think there's a huge shift going on. I think a lot of people right now are talking about this remote work. What is, what does that mean? Is this sort of permanent? Is this temporary? What are the secondary effects? I'm curious, um, what's something— you know, it's the Peter Thiel question— what's something that you believe about the future work that is not sort of consensus right now? It's not something that everybody is saying. Do you have any sort of original views or contrarian views around the future of work?

I mean, we will go back to offices, so let's be clear, but I think a lot of the fat will be cut. And what I mean by that is we used— I don't know about you guys, but I used to be in cabs and running and Ubers and subways and sprinting and planes and trains and like the frenzy of what I used to do because there are so many social norms. Like if I'm going to see you in the city, I wouldn't be like, "Hey, let me just Zoom you," right? You'd be like, "That's rude. Come visit me." Why? Like so just I think the amount of what I'm going to call like useless friction that we used to apply to our lives that now looks calmer. So that's great. I think, you know, I'm really bullish on just equalizing households. I actually think that this is, this is a great equalizer. Um, everybody's partaking in so many parts of running a household these days because we were locked in our homes, and that's going to create some permanent habits that I think are going to be better. And, um, you know, I, I, I'm really fortunate to have a phenomenal partner in my husband, and we've really do both a lot of everything around our home. And I think that that's going to be hopefully more normalized going forward, as I think a lot of parents are going to realize it's not a choice, stay home or work. Like, there's this very powerful middle path. And so, you know, I think the gig economy going into this intermittent work economy is just exploding right now. Like, you can work 20 hours a week if you want to, you can work 70 hours a week if you want to. And I think that we're going to— so the only other thing I'll say that I'm not content is I am deeply worried about how 40 million Americans are going to get back to work. And I don't think the markets right now, Main Street and Wall Street, are completely disconnected. I honestly wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning wondering, how are 15 million households going to be absorbed when those jobs don't come back? And I'm worried about that a lot. So that's one thing I'll say. I don't— I sometimes wonder why more people aren't talking about what we're going to do with the jobs that do not come back. And that worries me a lot.

What type of— what's your background? What part of Florida are you from?

So I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I was born in Kentucky. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. My mom's side of the family is from South Bend, Indiana. My grandfather was a welder who— his whole life, my grandmother worked at AT&T as like a them. I'm doing the spinning motion. She was literally operator, um, and then my dad's side of the family, uh, von Tobel, is Swiss, uh, Belgian, uh, and so, and then both my parents were in the Army as doctors and nurses, um, and so my brother was born in Germany and I was born in Kentucky.

And then, uh, so I'm from Missouri and then I lived in Tennessee, so I'm from a normal fam, like not a Silicon Valley, not a Manhattan family. I live in San Francisco now. I'm definitely on the inside of a lot of the San Francisco nerds. And it sounds like you are on the inside of the Manhattan relatively elite circle. I mean, the partner for your firm is a pretty big deal, the Pritzker family. Does it feel ever like you're an outsider? You said Main Street and Wall Street. Does it feel more like you're connected to your roots of where you grew up or do you identify more at this? I mean, and I say this because I'm in this crew too a little bit, in this relatively tight circle. I mean, where are you? Are you an outsider, do you think?

So glad you asked this question. I'm so glad for a bunch of reasons. And I think what's really obvious to me is I think it is an incredible competitive advantage. I think right now we are in a world where the country is very disconnected. I'm actually hoping that COVID is something that like does unify us a bit more. There's days where I worry it's moving in the wrong directions. There's days where I feel hopeful. I think the fact that I came from a really— again, my dad was in the Army as a doctor. My mom went to boot camp, was a nurse. My mom is a nurse practitioner. My dad passed away when I was younger, so I was actually raised by a single mom with 3 older— sorry, 3 kids. I have 2 older brothers who are also both doctors, but it reminds me every day that the bubble that we live in is completely ridiculous. And in fact, you know, I, I am a certified financial planner who stared at America's wallets for a decade, and the headline is people can't afford anything and everyone's stressed. And if you don't have dignity to be able to put food on a table for your family, guess what? That's a pretty stressful thing. If you're not sure how you're gonna— forget like saving for retirement— if you don't know how you can actually feed people right now Holy smokes. And now that I've become a parent, like, that's so much more visceral. And I actually think it's a real competitive advantage to remember that there's 300+ million households in this, in this country, and that not everybody is on the same page, and technology isn't always moving everybody forward. And so I think it's a major advantage to not forget that. And again, I'm literally in Jacksonville, Florida right now, in Ponte Vedra. In like my childhood bedroom. And I'm so proud of my roots and I'm so proud of my family and what they've helped me accomplish. And goodness gracious, do I feel like we need to do more bridging the country together.

So, and this is a good segue because earlier you said that people are actually still trying to solve the problem that you were trying to solve for. What opportunities exist in this financial planning, personal finance space? I'm a huge nerd in this. I use Wealthfront, I use Personal Capital, I've used Mint. I use spreadsheets. I love this stuff.

So, what's that product look like?

A self-driving wallet. You put rules and controls around it that say, my checking account always needs at least $400 in it, but every dollar above that, please go put it in the exact right place and take care of it.

So, what would you do? Would you— so, like I use Simple.com, I've been toying around with that, but what I learned was that it's a checking and savings account. It's actually, they use, I forget what's, whatever the biggest bank in like the world is. It's like B, I forget what it's called. Anyway, they put their software on top of another bank's checking account. And because it's opening up a bank is really hard. Is that what you would do? I mean, how would you go about solving this?

That's a pretty radical idea. That's kind of cool. Why do we get paid every 2 weeks? Is this like some— something that I don't— I have no idea.

It's a legacy concept. Some people get paid weekly, but most of us get paid twice a month. And if you think about that, people have liquidity crunches in between those two dates. But you work every day, so why don't you get paid every hour?

Yeah, what do you think of the company— I think it's called Earnin, I believe— that solves that problem, that tries to solve that problem?

Well, they're solving a portion of that problem. So what, um, but no, I think that, um, there's a few of them. There's Earnin, there's Dave, there's a bunch of other— there's a company called Even, um, which is, uh, but I'm, I'm— they are solving elements of it.

Have you seen the sort of crypto projects that are doing streaming money? Which is basically like the way we, you know, we don't download movie files anymore and play them. We stream it bit by bit as we watch, but basically getting paid like that. So why don't I get paid by the second that I'm working? And it's just streaming into my bank account, fractions basically of value. And there's crypto companies doing it.

What would prevent that? That's a crazy idea. And I think that's a That's a cool idea for someone who wants to, like, it's kind of like a go big or go home. That's a pretty cool idea. I like that. What would prevent that from working? What are the barriers?

It's the infrastructure layer that we, I was just saying, it's the money movement layer. ACH.

Because that, I mean, is it money movement or is it a cultural thing? Because I'm a business owner. Like, the 2 weeks buffer for a small business when you're just getting started, like businesses are, We take advantage of that, right? Like, you're like, oh great, I've got like 5 days. I gotta go collect this client's money and then I can make payroll.

Yeah, it's no, that I think is solvable. I mean, you have 2 leading edge companies. You know, I think in just the last week we saw a few companies say, work from home forever. But you take a few more that then say, we're gonna pay our employees daily. And in fact, Uber started paying its drivers every ride. That's an example of you've worked, you should get paid. Why do we withhold from you? It's a free loan to your employer. And at some point that will break down. But that's not the thing I think is harder. It's actually the money movement piece of because our wallets have been unbundled. We used to have wallets at one place, let's say Chase, and used to have your credit card there, your savings account there, your checking account, your 401k, et cetera. You now just, both of you have named while you've been on this call, 7 places that you have financial accounts. So it's money movement across those accounts, moves across an ACA trail. That ACA trail takes about 5 days, or it mimics it and it'll look like same day. And sometimes that same day is really more of like a magic trick. It's not really there. So then to be able to pay it out to some other place is very hard.

There's a European company, I think, who was doing something similar, uh, helping— what was it called?

Yeah, India just also came out and they announced a whole monetary, uh, API, basically a mandatory payments infrastructure, right? I forgot what it's called. UPI.

I love how much you guys know about fintech and infrastructure. I love it, guys. I could geek out with you.

Well, I don't know if you've heard this podcast, but what we do is we brainstorm ideas. We just shoot the shit and we brainstorm ideas, or we see something interesting and we say, hey, this is cool. These guys are doing streaming money. What would you do with that? Hey, why do we get— I think we literally had this conversation, which was, why do you get paid every 2 weeks? That's crazy. It's a free loan to your employer.. And so that's what we do on this podcast twice a week. So that's, yeah, we, we, we like to nerd out about this stuff.

We know a medium amount about a lot of topics.

A little bit. Only a little bit.

We know a little about a lot. Yeah.

A little bit.

Yeah. One, uh, one of my favorite ways to brainstorm is I like to look at companies in other countries and just be like, do that in America. So like Gilt Group, Kevin Ryan was like, oh, I see this French company's doing this. Let's just do that in America and we'll put a little spin on it. What's a European company or an Indian company that is doing this quite well that I can go and learn about in order to see like how this is done? Because this is like pretty hard to conceptualize, right? Because we're like, it's been done this way for who knows, decades, hundreds of years.

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, for the standard of what I want to see built, I don't believe that there's a company that is close. There's a company in the United States that's starting to think about this and doing a good job also called Tally, where Jason, the founder, is wonderful. And he was helping people. He started with credit card debt, pay off their credit card debt faster, which was the core pain point and starting automation around it. But I think I want to fast forward the decade ahead where we actually get to instant streaming money. I call it liquified money. You're calling it streaming money where your money can always be optimizing to the right place. And that gets pretty powerful when that begins to happen. But most importantly, not only is it powerful, it meaningfully changes the life of American families, meaningfully changes the lives.

I'll challenge one thing, which is, so I've heard this idea before about basically, hey, what's the category of what you built? It's like PFN, Personal Finance Manager. And the theory is basically you have things like Clarity Money and what LearnVast and others that were basically all like, hey, we can suggest some things, we can show you some charts and analysis, but like fundamentally you, the user, make the decision. And what you're talking about is the software makes the decision, right? Self-driving, basically. Like it's not, it's not you're sitting in your car and your car suggests to you how you should, you know, turn or change lanes. The car changes lanes because it knows where you're trying to get as your destination. And so I've heard before that, hey, what we need is for— to get that— get AI basically to the point where it can actually make the decisions and optimize the money for you so that the user doesn't have to make decisions. User says, I want— I have these financial goals for myself, this is my income coming in, here's my bills, and it basically does it. And what you added on was the reason that can't happen right now is because the transfer is too slow. But it seems like there's a middle step, which is just right now the software doesn't decide, the user decides. And most users don't want to think about that or make those decisions, that most people are not active with their money management, much to your chagrin, I'm sure. So is it more about software deciding versus users deciding, or is it more about liquefied money?

Uh, so liquefied money matters, but then to your point, um, so I'm going to like, I want to answer that with a, with a visual question. When we imagine money right now, we imagine money by saying, okay, I'm going to log into my, you know, my E-Trade account and I'm going to stare at all my graphs and, and, you know, look at things and I'm going to talk to an advisor and tell them my goals and then like a lot of things are going to be executed. Um, I almost think that we are thinking about the limits and the bounds of what technology offers today as opposed to what the customer really wants. If you ask the customer what they really want, they want enough money to do what they need to do and they want everything else to be taken care of. And like for most people thinking about money all day long is actually not fun or exciting. And in fact, it's quite stressful. And so I almost think we visualize money based on what exists, but imagine a thought exercise and I'll use an Amazon Alexa, uh, since, uh, it literally, there's like 17 in my brother's house and he just likes to yell at me all day and he thinks it's so funny. Um, but basically let's use an Amazon Alexa and imagine you could walk in your kitchen every morning and just say, You have surveillance, so you have rules that you've set around your wallet. So has anyone broken my identity? Has anyone done anything bad or untoward? Um, restrictions that you put on. So like my kids' credit cards can each only, you know, spend $50 a month and whatever it may be. And then you've already clearly laid out goals and it just does it for you. And so you walk in like, why do I even need to look at my money? All I care about is Are there any crises?

Um, are the rules I've set up in place? So any extra money, you know, I need $400 in my savings account for checking for, you know, if I need cash. We're gonna obviously go away from cash permanently at some point. Um, and then everything else just optimized for me. And that's math. The thing I love, you know, I am a math geek. I've always liked math growing up. I always loved it. Math is really beautiful because this isn't You know, we're not trying to cure something, a disease that we don't— this isn't a COVID situation where we don't know that, we don't know what to do yet. We are looking for a vaccine, to use that as an analogy. This is math. For every American wallet, I can mathematically tell you where their next dollar should go to save, to save them money, make their life better. Um, and outside of them telling us what their goals are, then the math can do it, and it can do it every hour or every minute. And at some point when you get there, that is better for the American wallet. And so that's the vision of that. That's literally the picture in the back of my head is like, when do we get to a place where my money is just doing what it should do at all times? And right now there's wild amounts of friction. Move it from here, put it in the savings account, sweep it into this, do this with this, pay off the credit card. To pay off your student loans, you have to make 2 payments and tell them, please pay the principal, not just the interest. Friction everywhere. And at some point it will go away and I want it to go away as fast as we can. And it will be some of my life's work to help that happen.

I don't think you should be a VC. I think you should go and start this. You are very persuasive. I feel like I'm ready to like get behind you and say, let's go to war. Thank you. You're very, you've got a very good pitch. I had one last question. Are you a fan of Ramit Sethi's teachings and his book?

His book, I Can Teach You English. He's a great guy. And I will say like Every financial planner out there that's doing good work to help people between now and when this beautiful future software can exist, I'm excited about.

I just, I feel a lot of your pain and I understand where you're coming from because I'm not poor anymore, but I remember being poor and like so afraid to look at my, log into my bank account. And then I eventually created all these systems. So it's like a little bit of paycheck goes here, a little bit of interest, this thing goes there, there, there. And I'm like, I like, jerry-rigged this thing together. And even to this day, I'm still like, I hate logging into my bank account just because for me it's like PTSD, right? You're like, it's so like, I just don't even automate some stuff because I'm like, I don't even want to. I hate it. I don't like that.

And this is a perfect example of where, you know, I really do think, you know, I grew up a really normal life. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, which is a wonderful place to grow up. And I just think, you know, I'm interested in technologies that can impact impact tens of millions of families. I— and like really meaningfully make our life better. And one last thing, you know, at Inspired Capital, we literally invest across all sectors. I just told you everything from trucking logistics to consumer software, um, to fintech. But one thing I particularly like about fintech is in fintech, any innovation is actually helping the customer, right? Like, you're not innovating in fintech in a way that like gouges the customer. It's like they're constantly making their life better and cheaper and less expensive. And the the pressure it puts on the big incumbents to drive their prices down is really powerful. And I think that's pretty awesome. So, I think it's a great place for me to use my brain.

This is awesome.

Love it. All right. We should wrap up. Alexa, you already gave your email address out. Where should people find you? Who should find you? How do people connect with you?

So, on Instagram, I'm just @alexa_vontobel. Our fund is Inspired Capital, but you can message me on Instagram and it's the one place I actively try to respond to as many that come through. Uh, so Alexa von Tobel on Instagram. And thank you guys for having me. This is so fun. You guys are so wonderful. And again, really honored you reached out.

Great, thanks for coming.

Thank you very much.