David King - CTO at Flywire

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to David King, the CTO at Flywire, and we discuss how to approach growing your network and creating relationships, what it takes to get your team to think like entrepreneurs, and advice for CTOs going through the M&A process. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Hey, buddy, how are you?

(David King at 00:00:36) I'm good. Yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Fantastic, man. Where are you calling in from?

(David King at 00:00:41) I am in Boston at our corporate headquarters, and I'm in a hotel because our office is under construction. We're adding another floor. So I was in there this morning and all I heard was drilling, so I'm like, that's not going to work for this podcast. So I went back to my hotel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) I've done some podcasts from the hotel before. You always hope that they don't knock on the door trying to clean the room.

(David King at 00:01:06) Yeah, I hung the "do not disturb" sign just before I started, too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) You guys are building another floor, so you guys are growing.

(David King at 00:01:15) Yes, yes. We're growing like mad. So we have our Boston office. We're right off the Boston Commons, and we have two floors there and we're growing. And we've acquired a third floor and we're building out that floor and connecting the additional floor to the others right now. So a lot of construction, a lot of drilling going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) Well, that's exciting. Growth is exciting. So the past couple weeks, you said you were in some executive management meetings?

(David King at 00:01:45) Yep. Yeah, so we've been doing a lot. Flywire's growing like mad, right? And so we've got to keep everything on track and going in the right direction. So two weeks ago I did a product and engineering meeting where I pulled the leaders of the product group and the engineering group, which report to me. We did some planning for Q4. Part of it, too, is Flywire's grown through some acquisitions, so we're pulling together different cultures and different teams. So we talked about how we're going to work together as a unit going forward. Then the week after that, or last week, then we had our executive team retreat, kind of starting to prep for 2020 and where we want to go as a company in 2020.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) I like how you brought everyone in from all over the world to one location to get together, have food, talk, get to explore engineering ideas and practices. What I experienced of it was really cool.

(David King at 00:02:43) Yeah, yeah. Thanks. And thanks for showing up and helping facilitate some of that, right? So it was fun. Yeah, part of it's learning to work together and being social with each other, right? One of my mantras is people do business with people. And so if you get to know someone on a personal level, you're going to work better with them, right? And so part of that is not only going through some long days, which you were part of, of working, but then some fun evenings together, socializing and getting to know someone at a different level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Yeah, the personal relationship just makes it so much more interesting, right?

(David King at 00:03:15) That's right. Yep. And that way you can solve problems better, too, because if someone has an opinion or doesn't align with your opinion and you kind of know them personally, you know where they're coming from more, right? And you're able to then interact with that person and work towards a solution better because you understand their point of view a little better, rather than, "Oh, this guy's just fighting me on a topic or whatever," right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:38) So today you're the CTO of Flywire, this massive payments company that's awesome. They got their start in education payments, right?

(David King at 00:03:47) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) And then, but you weren't always just the CTO. You've been a CTO, you've been a founder, you're very entrepreneurial.

(David King at 00:03:56) Correct. Yeah, so I'm an entrepreneur at heart with a technological background. So this has been my third, fourth startup that I've been through and sold in some form or fashion. So, kind of like a history on how I got into this space, right? I kind of took a different path than most people, I think, because I wasn't a classically trained engineer, right, or software developer. My background's in physics and mathematics. I was actually working on my PhD in physics and then I decided to drop out and pursue a path in engineering. But how I got to engineering was I fell in love with computers more as a hobby. So, you know, my very first access to a computer was in high school. Did some basic programming on a TRS-80 Model IV, right? So, nothing like "10 PRINT HELLO WORLD, 20 GOTO 10, RUN" and just let that iterate over and over, right? Like, GOTOs were your favorite statements in the world back then. But in high school, I was like, "Oh, that was kind of cool," but I didn't have a passion. I didn't really build a passion for it at that point in time. I still was chasing down the world of physics. Then when I was in my undergraduate degree, I was taking a numerical analysis class and we're doing approximations using like Runge-Kutta rule, Simpson method. And one day I was like, "Man, grinding all this mathematics sucks." I was like, "I bet you a computer's really good at this." So I picked up a book, learned Pascal on the fly, and then I started doing my homework. Rather than doing it handwritten, I wrote programs to do all the approximations and I turned that in. And my math professor was really cool. He accepted that as homework and he was like, "Hey, this is pretty cool that you're doing this." And so he started teaching me some extra programming. So that's how I first kind of got into it and more of like, "Hey, I could use a computer to make my life easier and solve some business problems." So that's kind of how I got into technology itself. Then when I went to work on my PhD, I worked in a field of physics called condensed matter, and that's where I did even more programming. So condensed matter physics basically deals with what are the properties of a solid or some matter, and how do the atomic and electronic interactions predict the outcome of these things, right? So that's led to a bunch of solid-state transistors, things along those lines, right? That's kind of what condensed matter physics focuses on—the macroscopic and microscopic properties of matter. And so in doing that, though, there was an emerging field of condensed matter physics called computational physics. Rather than, again, kind of hand-cranking all of the theory, people were starting to write programs to simulate this theory. So I picked up Fortran and C++ and started writing programs to simulate atomic interactions. And so again, I just kept learning and applying it to problems I had. And back then we were doing a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations, and we were doping basically rare earth elements into materials to see how that would influence superconductivity in the material. And so that's how I got into programming, and I just saw the power of how you can apply it to solving business use cases. And I just wanted to merge the two, and then that led me to being an entrepreneur to apply technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:02) And so where was the first moment when you saw a business problem and it kind of all came together?

(David King at 00:08:08) So one of the first things—I did work for a company straight out of graduate school, but I only worked for them for a little bit. And I was like, "I want to go do my own thing." So I started a consulting company of my own, and I landed a consulting gig at a large pharmaceutical company. And back then, the companies would submit—as you're working through a new drug and trying to get it to market, you would go through a series of clinical trials, which is basically it's passed all the animal testing and everything, but now you're testing on humans. And then you have to capture just tons and tons of data, right? And then you compile all this data to submit it to the FDA to get approval. And at the company, they brought me in to work on a project, and I saw this going on. And this is like early '90s. And I was like, "Why are we having doctors fax all this data into us? And then we have all these people gathering up all these fax documents with data on it, and then we're rekeying it." And then we're still bundling up a paper document, massive paper book, and sending it to the FDA. Like, this process can be electronified. So we built a system at that large pharma. We were one of the first large pharmaceutical companies to build an electronic drug submission process. So basically, you know, it wasn't great back then. This was pre-true internet, right? So we went out, put workstations at the doctors, built a client-server application in a 4GL known as Uniface, which was from Compuware back in the day, put modems out there. They would dial up and they would key all the data into the system rather than faxing it. And then the system continued to aggregate, and then we ultimately submitted all that data electronically. And that was one of the first applications of doing an electronic drug submission. That's pretty cool. Streamline the process, streamline the speed of approval, because we also were able to provide cleaner data and provide results and some metrics on that data as we were submitting it, rather than the FDA itself going through all the paperwork. So that's one of my first earlier use cases of solving a business problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) So we get questions from the audience all the time and kind of let them stack up, and I look for the right people to answer these questions. So one question we've got is, you know, as an entrepreneur with that founder-type mindset, how do you get your team and your employees to think and solve problems like an entrepreneur?

(David King at 00:10:54) Yeah, so that's a good question. You know, to me it's always been about putting the customer first as an entrepreneur, right? And working and thinking about what the possibilities are. So, you know, I always say we don't see challenges, we see opportunities, right? And getting everyone to see that and see the potential outcome and think about, "What if we did this? What impact would it have? How would it improve business? Can we increase revenue for a company? Can we decrease cost? Can we do both?" Like, if you've got a company that can do both, then you're amazing by applying some technology that way. So it's just creating a culture and a mindset to be exploratory and to not be fearful of challenges but see those as opportunities to change something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:40) And for founders or maybe just executives, like, let's say there's been actually a lot of mergers and acquisition activity going on if you watch PitchBook or follow any type of financial institution. So that's actually something I get asked a lot. It's like, what type of advice do you have for CTOs or VPs of engineering, technology leaders that are going through an M&A process?

(David King at 00:12:06) Yeah, I mean, so first of all, if you're—depends on what side of the equation you are on on that, right? But let's assume you're on the being acquired side, all right? Because it's happened to me several times. Number one, if you are going to be acquired, make sure the acquiring company, you have the right culture fit. Like, first and foremost, you've got to have a good culture fit. You've got to be comfortable with the people that are acquiring you. You know, that's to me, that's number one. All other things could be there, like, "Hey, it may look like we'll kill the market. The technology's completely aligned." But if there's not people alignment, none of that's going to come to fruition. So because I've always looked at an M&A like you're getting married, right, to this other company. That's exactly what it is. They're making a proposal to you. You're getting engaged, and you're going to go through a honeymoon. So the first six months of the acquisition is going to feel awesome. Then month six is going to hit and you're going to go, "Oh my god, what did I do?" right? So you have to approach it as though you would approach any type of marriage. Like, is this really the right partner for me? How will I feel about this partner year one, year two, year three, right? Or will I be long-term committed to that or not? So an acquiring company does an awful lot of diligence on the company they're buying, but I would say that the company that's being acquired needs to apply reverse diligence and do the same level back to make sure it's a good fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) So I researched Flywire before I went and spoke to your teams. You guys have an unbelievably high culture rating on Glassdoor and different sites. People leave amazing reviews for what it's like to work at Flywire. Like, why? Why do you think it's like that?

(David King at 00:13:49) So we've focused hard on building an open culture. You know, like our—I'm in our office that's under construction. No executives have offices. Our CEO, Mike Massaro, is right out in the open. So literally anyone who wants to come up and ask him a question, they can at any point in the day. Same with me, same with anyone in the company. So, you know, it's just a complete open culture, open transparency about everything that we do. We promote fun, right? So working hard and not having fun just leads to burnout. So we promote having a good time while doing it, right? And the focus on our customer. I think what's also unique that adds some high rating for us, too, is we're very multicultural. So we've got 10 offices throughout the world, right? And one of the things that a lot of our people can do, if you wanted to do a sabbatical and go to another office for six months, you're more than welcome to do that. So we've got an office in Valencia, Spain. So if someone wanted to pick up and go work out of our Spain office and enjoy the summer there, they can totally go and do that. So we're very open about letting people move around and shift and find what they want to do. So just a high level of collaboration, too, across everyone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Can you remind me of the founding story about how Flywire got started?

(David King at 00:15:15) Yeah, so the original founder was a man named Iker Marcaide. So he was from Spain and he was coming to the U.S. to a school in Boston to study. I believe he was working on a graduate degree. And, you know, international students have to pay the school in full, right? You don't get financial aid and so forth. And there's, at that point in time, not a really great way to pay a school internationally. Typically what you would do is either do a wire or some type of bank transfer, but the banks aren't great at it either. And so basically what happens is, you know, you initiate a transfer from Spain to some school in Boston. It goes through a couple of bank hops. Everyone takes a piece of their money along the way, right, because there's fees. So let's say, you know, the school says, "Hey..."

(David King at 00:16:06) Your tuition is $10,000, right? So first of all, you gotta convert from euros to USD, then there's some cuts along the way. And lo and behold, not $10,000 shows up in the school bank account—some other number. But there's also no information that went along with it, so they don't know who transferred that money.

(David King at 00:16:28) Right? Now it also doesn't match a tuition rate that they've billed, so they're like, "Hey, what is this $9,253 for? Whose is it?"

(David King at 00:16:37) There's no student ID. It doesn't match anyone we've billed this amount. So then there's all this confusion. And so what happened is that happened to Iker. He transferred money.

(David King at 00:16:45) He showed up at this school, and they're like, "We never got your tuition payment. You're not enrolled anymore." So he was like, "This is a problem." He's like, "I've got proof that I did this." And so he basically set out to solve that problem and make it easier for international students to pay schools and also to solve the problem because this was a huge reconciliation issue for colleges and universities.

(David King at 00:17:10) Right? They have staff dedicated to solving this problem in the past. So it also, again, provided a business value to the school of improved reconciliation, improved matching to the students, and a better student experience because now the student shows up and everything's paid. So Flywire was created to solve that problem in higher education for an international student to initiate a payment in their local currency, get it converted into the arriving currency with no fees taken and the exact dollar amount matched, as well as metadata about that student flowing. So when the school sees that deposit, they also see it's for David King, as an example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) You could just—I could feel as you're telling the story that feeling of, you know, you get off a plane in a new country, you go to this school, you show up, you're going to live there, you have essentially all your belongings with you. And they say, you know, "We don't have your payment. You've been unenrolled." Right? That's a horrible feeling.

(David King at 00:18:08) Right. Yeah. When in a foreign country, you're all excited, and the first thing is, "Sorry, you may have to go back home." Right? Not a good user experience by any stretch of the imagination.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:20) So that's where they got their start, and then they expanded from education into health care payments, and that's when they ran into you, right?

(David King at 00:18:29) Correct. Yeah. So, you know, that's where we got our start. Today, in terms of Flywire, we have local banking accounts in over 46 markets throughout the world. So we're moving money and helping kids come across to school.

(David King at 00:18:46) And again, it's likewise. We go the other way—a US student going over to the UK to study, as an example. So funds flow go both ways. So what that was—Flywire's core was international student payments.

(David King at 00:19:01) They started to diversify into doing health care international payments. So, you know, medical tourism is becoming a thing, right? So someone from overseas wants to come to the US for maybe some plastic surgery or something like that. You know? Or, what's not uncommon, someone has a heart condition and wants to go to the Cleveland Clinic, right? Because it's the best heart hospital in the country. So a similar problem existed for international patients wanting to come to the US for better health care. So Flywire started to expand in that.

(David King at 00:19:37) That market isn't quite as big as the education market is in terms of international payers. My previous company that I cofounded with John Talaga called OnPlan—we were in health care and higher education. In the higher education market, we focused on domestic students, right, whereas Flywire's international students.

(David King at 00:19:59) So students that are US students paying USD, interacting with the schools. And we do tuition and billing and payment and payment plans for the higher education domestic students. We also were big in health care. That was where we really first started. So in the health care market, we started OnPlan in 2014, and we set out to solve the high deductible health care plan that's facing the US patients today. Not sure if everyone knows the statistic, but basically an unplanned medical event can bankrupt nearly 60% of the US population today.

(David King at 00:20:41) The average American has just a little north of $600 in their savings account. And so if you have an unplanned medical event that's north of that and you have a high deductible health care plan, which is typically for an individual $2,500 out of pocket, you have a bad financial situation arising, right? So what we set out to do was help patients make health care more affordable as well as also solve the problem that this was creating for the health care providers. So before high deductible health care plans, roughly 90% of their revenue came from a payer.

(David King at 00:21:23) Well, in health care, a payer historically was the insurance company—the insurance company paying for the medical expense. 10% was typically covered by the patient. With high deductible health care plans, that almost switched from 90/10 to 70/30. So now there's 30% and going north of that that's now paid by the patient. But health care institutions really didn't change the way they billed and collected.

(David King at 00:21:49) And so now they started to have a receivables problem growing. So what we did in the health care system is we applied some of our knowledge from higher education of offering students payment plans for when they have a gap between financial aid and their tuition expense. And so we rolled out a system to health care that auto-qualified patients for payment plans. So instead of getting a statement that says, "Hey, Joel, you owe us $1,000. Good luck paying," you would get a statement that says, "Hey, Joel, you have a $1,000 bill. You could pay in full, or we'll set you up on a payment plan."

(David King at 00:22:28) And what was unique about the product and application—again, that's solving technology and business—we pull in some financial scoring data on people. We mine your historical payment behavior at that hospital, and then we've got an analytics algorithm that determines what is the right amount to get this individual to make that monthly installment. So you and I could go to the same hospital, both leave with a $1,000 balance. I'm a little more financially strapped than you. So my payment arrangement may be 10 installments at $100 a month, but yours may be four installments at $250 because we know you can write that check for $250.

(David King at 00:23:09) So we're trying to balance making it comfortable for the patient to pay and get that hospital paid as quickly as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) That's huge business value. That's unbelievable.

(David King at 00:23:20) Yep. So we were in that market, Flywire and OnPlan. And we were at that point in time—we were growing so rapidly as OnPlan. We were out doing a raise, right? So an institutional raise.

(David King at 00:23:32) Before that, we were all kind of friends and family funded and some angel investors, so we're doing an institutional round. We had a high level of interest. Sharon Butler, who is one of the cofounders of Flywire along with Iker—her and I go way back. We bumped into each other again. She knew I was back in higher education as well.

(David King at 00:23:53) And so she's like, "Hey, we need a domestic product to offer to our schools. You're in that. Sharon and I had a longstanding history." And she was like, "Hey, what if we came together?" And so Flywire and OnPlan came together in 2018. So, again, going back to the M&A thing, I knew that was gonna be a good relationship. I knew Sharon for a long time. I knew Flywire as a company. You know, John and I did our reverse due diligence on the team to make sure that that fit was gonna be perfect.

(David King at 00:24:23) And I've been through several M&As in my life, and this one's been awesome—just synergy across the board and a great cultural fit. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) Yeah. Relationships are just massively important, right? Everything happens through relationships. When you were starting OnPlan, did you leverage any of your existing relationships to help you get that going?

(David King at 00:24:48) Yes. Yeah. So when we—my partner John's experience was in health care. So he created a company prior to OnPlan that was called HealthComm Partners, and they had a product called Patient Compass. Nick actually coined the term back in the day, "patient-friendly billing," because patient bills used to be awful, and they were kind of redesigning how hospitals would bill.

(David King at 00:25:14) He sold his company to McKesson Health in 2006. So when we started OnPlan, he had deep relationships into the health care market, which helped us. My previous business that I had started and sold was in higher education, so I had deep relationships with higher education. We reached back out to some of our favorite customers, basically saying, "Hey, we're coming back. You wanna work with us again?" And we picked up our early customers that way, right? They're innovative customers, right?

(David King at 00:25:43) Whether it was the education institution or the health care institution, they like to be viewed as innovators, so they wanted to work with a new technology company that was taking different approaches. So those were our early customers. We leveraged those relationships and the fact that as an institution, they liked to be innovative and take some risks to try and change their business. So that's how we got our traction in the early days of OnPlan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:09) That's something I'm continuously learning over and over—about relationships. So what sort of advice would you have for newer leaders, maybe in their thirties or forties, and they want to increase the number of meaningful relationships?

(David King at 00:26:27) Yeah. You know, so I'll—attend as many events as you can, right? And that may be hard for some technologists. I'll say this: I'm a massive introvert. So going to a meetup that's more of a business meetup—in the higher education specific—so I'm not going there to meet with a bunch of other CTOs, but I'm going to meet with the directors of student financial services or things like that. That's a high-stress environment for me being an introvert, right?

(David King at 00:26:56) So I gotta apply a lot of energy and effort, but it's worth it. You gotta go there because you gotta meet those people. You gotta get to know them because they're gonna be the people that are gonna be the buyers of your product, right? So I look to go to things where I know there's gonna be buyers of my product so I can start to network, start to know the people. But that's where you also hear the problems that they're faced with, right? And so I use that a lot as an informational gathering session. I just walk around and talk to people like, "Hey, what's your challenge that you're being faced with today? What do you think your challenge is gonna be 24 months from now?"

(David King at 00:27:33) Because I wanna get all that information to bring it back into the product team so that we can then start to get ahead and start building those features that are gonna be pains—or products that are gonna address pains—for these organizations. Also do a lot of meetups with other technology groups. You know, I'm involved with other CTO forums and so forth. So building that network is invaluable in terms of helping you, specifically if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, to get your business off the ground because, you know, there's a lot of things you will not know or be challenged with, right?

(David King at 00:28:06) As an entrepreneur, you have to do everything, right, from doing the books sometimes to doing sales, to running the technology, to cleaning the kitchen at night because no one else wants to clean the kitchen when they leave. Right? And you're like, "I'm not gonna let my office be messy." And so then you need, though—you need a good network to go to for advice because, you know, you're gonna know what you don't know. You're gonna run into a situation and you're like, "Okay, who can I tap on that's gonna give me advice and coach me through the situation or help me or help me find someone that could come into my company and help me?"

(David King at 00:28:40) So that network's invaluable in terms of information. And then when you also get into the fundraising round, trying to raise funds just by going out cold is really, really hard, right? But if you got someone that you know that knows someone at a firm and they can make a warm introduction, your chances of success of closing a round or getting interest from that organization just went up tenfold. So every little piece of connections really can help you through the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) So I really—I got to see you interact with your team. And I respect you a lot as a leader because they really believe in you, and they see you as a very valuable leader. But I'm curious, what do you value in your leaders? What do you value in the people that are on your team?

(David King at 00:29:34) Sure. I value innovation and thinking differently really high. Value diversity of opinion. So I don't want people that think like me. I want people that think different than me so they can challenge me.

(David King at 00:29:47) So I value them challenging, but being open to a logical debate and knowing what's right and not, and then also ability to compromise, right? So I'm fine with debate, but don't get so caught into your way of thinking and think it's only right. Be open to that there may be an outcome where the combination of the ideas is the right idea, right? So those are key to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Yeah. I heard someone describe it: strong opinions, loosely held.

(David King at 00:30:17) Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Another one of my old board members used to—he had a saying. He was like, "As you're as an entrepreneur and as you're building things," he goes, "you need to be rigidly flexible."

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:33) You're right. Because you can't be apathetic, right? You have to care and have some sort of formed opinion based on experience or knowledge or something like that. But at the same time, you also have to be willing to adjust given new data.

(David King at 00:30:48) Correct. Yep. Yeah. That's exactly right. You can walk in with an opinion. You'd be really strong about where you're at. But as with anything else, you get new data—that's a new point. That's a new set of information, and you need to reevaluate your opinion based on this new dataset, right? And you have to realize that you may have to change direction based on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) So I imagine some people are listening right now, right—some great technology leaders, engineers, individuals—and they're like, "Woah, I really like this David guy. I have, you know, strong opinions loosely held. I match those culture items." What's the best way for them to go about learning more for a career at Flywire?

(David King at 00:31:29) Sure. You know, so on Flywire's site, there's a careers page. We're always looking to hire amazing talent. And then if someone wanna reach out to me directly, I'm on LinkedIn under David King and Flywire. You should be able to find me. That's where I spend most of my time. So in terms of social, that's the best way to get ahold of me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:48) Yeah. And you're a growing company, growing in every aspect, right?

(David King at 00:31:52) Correct. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So we're just over 400 employees worldwide today, and we will probably add another 100 next year. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) As we start to wrap up here, I want to know, what's the thing that you are most excited about?

(David King at 00:32:13) That's a — there's a lot of things to be excited about with what we've got going on at Flywire. That's a really hard question. You know, I would say just in terms of Flywire and our opportunity, we are really impacting patients' lives, students' lives. We are in Flywire right now where we've got a startup within our startup.

(David King at 00:32:37) We are going after the commercial market because one of the things we've built is this amazing international banking network. We can transfer and move money around the world faster and more accurately than anyone. And there's a huge need in the broader markets outside of healthcare and higher education in terms of that needs our help, like a travel industry, as an example. So we've got a startup going that's exploring where else we can apply our technology and our banking network to other industries. And I think those could dwarf what we're doing in higher education and healthcare already.

(David King at 00:33:14) So that's a really exciting market. That's a fun time to be in because that's a lot of test, fail, test, fail, test, fail. Right? And that's kind of fun stuff to be doing. So, like, hey, we got an idea. Well, that didn't work out well. So what failed with that idea? And let's iterate and then go to the next one. So that's an exciting component of our business right now.

(David King at 00:33:33) And then just the growth potential that's ahead of us in our core markets of healthcare and higher education. So we have more to do than we know what to do with right now. Fun spot to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) Is that startup publicly launched already, or no?

(David King at 00:33:48) Yeah, yeah. So we've got — we're boarding clients. It's generating revenue. So it's a small component compared to the overall healthcare and higher education business, but it's showing very good promise early.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) Is it another brand, or is it within — is it Flywire this or Flywire that?

(David King at 00:34:07) Yeah, so it's just Flywire. We internally call it Flywire Commercial. So, and then that's very broad, right? But we may be ultimately targeting it to, like, Flywire Travel. Right? So we're trying to find niches within the broad commercial. Because we can't serve every commercial customer in the world, right?

(David King at 00:34:26) So we're trying to test certain markets within the broader commercial area, like travel as an example. Maybe insurance companies — like, where we can fit. And so then we'll kind of focus on those key areas. But we're testing various submarkets within the commercial world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) I love it. The future is bright.

(David King at 00:34:45) Yep, yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:45) David, we did it, man. We made a podcast.

(David King at 00:34:49) All right. Excellent, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Is there anything else that you wanted to get out that we didn't cover?

(David King at 00:34:55) No, I think it's good. You know, I would say anyone that's out there that's a technologist or a CTO or engineer — man, entertain being an entrepreneur along the way. I love the marriage of being both the CTO and an entrepreneur and driving and building product and seeing a company built off of that product. So I encourage you, if you have that in your head that you want to consider doing that, take that leap. So don't be afraid to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Take the leap. I love it. That's great advice. You can come on the show and you can motivate the audience as much as you want. I'll give you the whole hour. You could develop a speech. You just come in here and just Tony Robbins it — do the "hire them to do more and achieve more." I love it, man. That's my style.

(David King at 00:35:40) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) David, this was great. And that's it, man. We made a podcast.

(David King at 00:35:44) All right, Joel. Thanks. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) Thank you. Have a productive day, David.

(David King at 00:35:48) All right. You too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:49) See you.