Rich Aberman - Chief Strategy Officer at WePay

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Rich Aberman, the Chief Strategy Officer at WePay, and we discuss what it looks like pushing through the hard days of a startup, why it's easy for founders to fall into the wrong role by default, and how great it feels to be able to hire your mentors. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) So we're just going to hang out and talk. There's not a big interview. I don't switch personalities. I get interviewed by other people sometimes and they turn into different humans when the interview starts. We're just going to hang out, and I guess I'm most interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) I love the word platitudes, by the way. It's a baller word to use. But what are the core tenets of the company?

(Rich Aberman at 00:00:55) Yeah. I guess I'll start with, I think, the one that's most personal to me, which is invest in relationships. I started the company with my best friend, college roommate, and I think the culture that we have today is a derivative of that. So the relationship that we have with our investors, with our early customers. I think when our back's been against the wall, historically, it's always been what's pulled us through, is being able to lean on those interpersonal connections. And my hope is that that type of dynamic continues as the company outgrows the founders.

(Rich Aberman at 00:01:30) And folks don't need to drink beers together outside the office, but we want them to genuinely like each other and enjoy spending time with one another in the office. And I think if we can continue that as we scale, we'll be in pretty good shape. So happy to go on, but that's the big one for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) No, it's a very important one. Relationships are everything in life. How many people do you have at the company?

(Rich Aberman at 00:01:52) Well, how many do we have now? I think 340. Yeah. So I think we were acquired at a little over 200. And so the goal was to double the size of the company in two years.

(Rich Aberman at 00:02:04) So we're a little off track to hiring goals, but tough hiring environment. So we're still hiring aggressively across all departments, particularly product and engineering. So 340, hopefully growing to, I don't know, growing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) That's exciting, though, right?

(Rich Aberman at 00:02:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) How did you meet your co-founder?

(Rich Aberman at 00:02:22) So Bill was my college freshman year roommate. We were in a similar program when we went to Boston College. And I think we ended up being roommates and close friends or best friends, but I think there was a lot of mutual respect there. He was just someone that challenged me intellectually and I think shared a lot of common interests but different skill sets. And I think that makes a very nice co-founding team.

(Rich Aberman at 00:02:45) So we on and off were mates through undergrad. Post-graduation, we both went on our respective ways. He went into finance as an investment banker. I was on my way to law school, and I think we were just both not terribly thrilled about what those paths looked like. I had a deeper calling in entrepreneurship, and the timing was right when we embarked on this journey in 2008.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Okay. So you guys have been doing it 12, 13, a while now.

(Rich Aberman at 00:03:15) Yeah. I guess it's the only job I've ever had post-college. It's the only real job I've ever had. And it's been 12 years. It does not feel like 12 years.

(Rich Aberman at 00:03:26) I think every year has been a very, very different company, very different job, very different requirements to be successful, different environment that we've been operating in. So it probably feels like three or four tours of duty, I'd say, where you have the super early stage days where we're just trying to figure out what to do every day when we wake up and try to make it to the next rung in the ladder. There is the post-initial financing where we had real capital for the first time to hire outside employees. And, you know, I can go through the whole journey if you're interested. But the last one is, what does post-acquisition WePay look like?

(Rich Aberman at 00:04:00) And I think we're writing that script as we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:03) Is there a lot of energy going on over there in the offices?

(Rich Aberman at 00:04:06) Yeah. More than I expected. You know, when we made the decision to sell the company, I think we went into it with eyes wide open, prepared for what that could mean for the company, but committed to doing everything we could not to result in that eventuality. And so if you told me two years ago or three years ago when we made the decision to sell that we'd have as much enthusiasm and momentum in the company as we do now, I probably wouldn't have believed it. I think we're in a very good spot, both personally as founders, looking at our baby reach maturity, and as shareholders in JPMorgan Chase looking at the position we're in, both broadly as a firm and specifically in technology in Silicon Valley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) So why WePay? Why did you decide? What is it, and then why did you decide to build it?

(Rich Aberman at 00:04:55) Yeah. So the company today is, I think, very, very different than the original vision that we were excited to pursue as young, first-time, relatively inexperienced entrepreneurs. So the initial vision, and I hesitate to even say the word vision because in retrospect it feels extremely sophomoric, was to make it really easy to send and receive money online, particularly young people that were sharing expenses. And now it's so trivial because almost, maybe first of all, every week there's a new startup that reaches out to us that's trying to solve the same problem. You want to split a bill at the dinner table.

(Rich Aberman at 00:05:36) But it's also the quintessential example of a problem that's not really deep enough or persistent enough to justify a company or a solution. Maybe it's a feature of some other product. So that was the original idea. You know, this was pre-Venmo, pre-Zelle, pre-Square Cash, pre-Apple Cash, pre-Facebook Cash. And the insight was there's got to be a more social mobile way to send and receive money.

(Rich Aberman at 00:06:03) Facebook had opened up its platform to third-party developers. People, you know, everyone had an iPhone at this point, and it just really hadn't, the peer-to-peer send and receive money hadn't really arrived yet. And so that was the original vision. To make a long story short, we realized fairly early on that building a network was expensive and hard. And the pure peer-to-peer value prop that we were offering wasn't valuable enough to get people to pay for it.

(Rich Aberman at 00:06:35) So maybe we could have let people send and receive money for free, but they weren't going to pay us 3%. So we weren't in it to run a nonprofit. And so we started experimenting with different value-add use cases on top of those payment rails that we had built. So we built a really simple store builder, like a considerably stripped-down version of Shopify today. We built a really easy donation platform.

(Rich Aberman at 00:06:58) We built an invoicing solution. We built an event management solution, like a stripped-down version of Eventbrite. So we built all these capabilities. We were just trying to find our killer use case. Then we realized in every vertical that we tried to compete in, and for every use case, there was some really elegant, really robust SaaS solution that already did that.

(Rich Aberman at 00:07:18) Eventbrite already did a great job at event management. Shopify already did a great job at e-commerce. FreshBooks and QuickBooks already did a great job at invoicing. And so the insight that I think changed the course of the company, probably early 2013, so almost five years after founding the company, was we had built a really robust payment infrastructure that was able to power a variety of different use cases. And so to the extent we can open up our APIs and allow external developers and platforms to consume the payment infrastructure that we have built, we'd have a much more leveraged, differentiated business.

(Rich Aberman at 00:07:54) And so at that point in our history, we had raised already, I think, $30 million of venture capital. You know, we had 100 and some odd people. Our brand name, our culture, everything about the business was based on that historical value proposition of us building our own tools and workflows and solutions. And the majority of our revenue was in that arena as well. And I think that was probably the biggest pivot or decision we ever made was to sunset that historical business that we had founded the company on and go all in on what we would now call an integrated channel strategy.

(Rich Aberman at 00:08:32) And that's the solution that ended up growing our business to something that was exciting enough for JPMorgan Chase to acquire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:38) Did it start as the name WePay?

(Rich Aberman at 00:08:41) Yeah. We founded the company as WePay. That's right. It was the first and only name that we ever had. I actually love the name.

(Rich Aberman at 00:08:49) It has a lot of personal meaning because it was the baby that we started 12 years ago. But I almost regret not changing the name earlier when we made the decision to pivot to an API business and an infrastructure business. Because the name itself, and to our credit, I think we got fairly good traction as a peer-to-peer group payments business. And there's a lot of, you know, I would call it brand equity if we never pivoted, but then it's brand baggage once we take it. And so people still associate us in part because of the name, I think, with that original business.

(Rich Aberman at 00:09:24) And if we would have, you know, changed our name to PaymentTech or made up some name earlier on, I think it would have helped us make a cleaner pivot and really capitalize on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:35) When I first heard about it, I was like, oh, this must be the payment solution for WeChat.

(Rich Aberman at 00:09:39) Yeah. They have a WeChat Pay, so I'm sure at some point we'll run into some trademark issues, but WePay would be a more elegant name for them for sure. Maybe we'll sell it and divest this department at some point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) There's a strategy. When you were younger, were you really into tech, or was it just something that was just kind of there? Were you playing video games and stuff or no?

(Rich Aberman at 00:09:59) Yeah. I played a lot of video games. I was always a tinkerer. So I think it was less cutting-edge technology and electronics and more problem solving. So I love puzzles and logic. And I think most of what I've done in my role, I think there's pure technologists that have grown up, you know, writing code at 10 years old and playing games and trying to dissect them.

(Rich Aberman at 00:10:28) And I almost have a degree of insecurity and envy for, I think, folks that have that DNA. I think if I had it as the head of product and head of strategy at WePay, we probably would have arrived at our end state faster because I think we would have read the tea leaves a little bit better and been able to execute on it from a product strategy perspective. But I think what I've excelled at and what I've enjoyed at WePay is much more developing over time, not at the outset, so it wasn't a vision that I had going into it, a deep understanding of our market and our industry and our customers and saying, how do those things come together in a unique capability that we can develop to provide value to our customers and capitalize on it? And so that's been a 10-year logic game that I think I've enjoyed, and I'm not sure where that ends when technology begins. But I'm sure at some point, they intersect nicely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:19) So this morning, I was listening to this older guy. His name's Art Williams. He's a billionaire insurance guy from the '80s and '90s. He's super old now. But he gave these big speeches and stuff because he started as a football coach and then grew this billion-dollar life insurance company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:40) And he was talking about, you know, the difficult moments in business, how you feel like you keep getting it off the ground and then you're back at square one over and over and over. And I resonate with that, right, being in a startup world. But I was curious, you guys have gotten to the point where you actually have sold, but there were definitely difficult times. How did you and your business partner, how did you get through them?

(Rich Aberman at 00:12:05) Yeah. I forget the, what's the cliche? It's like desperation is the key ingredient to innovation or something like that. Yeah. I think most of the major leaps that we've taken as a company have come at points where, you know, we've been in the deepest of existential crises.

(Rich Aberman at 00:12:21) That is where a lot of the innovation has come from, or at least the hard decisions where you're almost forced to make them one way or the other. I asked, so our general counsel has been with us for a long time, had a really exciting exit in a previous company. And I remember asking her, at what point at that company did she feel like they had made it, crossed the chasm? It wasn't going to go to zero. Who knows how big the outcome would be?

(Rich Aberman at 00:12:47) And she said when the money hit the bank account after the acquisition. Not when they were growing very quickly, not when they had interested buyers, not when they signed, you know, an agreement, but when the money, the wire hit. And I didn't really believe it at the time. So I was like, there's got to be some moment where you feel like you've made it. And, you know, we've had a, I think, phenomenal outcome for us, for our shareholders, for our employees, but, you know, we didn't have a multibillion-dollar IPO.

(Rich Aberman at 00:13:14) And I wonder for those companies, do they ever feel like they made it? Even with the IPO, I'm sure those CEOs and those founders are still losing sleep at night for, no matter how unlikely, all the possible terminus states that are not favorable. So yeah, I think that resonates with me a lot. I can go through a million horror stories as to when we really thought we were at the ropes. You know, two weeks of payroll left in a fairly later-stage financing round.

(Rich Aberman at 00:13:44) Points of time during the acquisition, for no fault of JPMorgan's or our own, it seemed like there might not actually be a light at the end of the tunnel. Thank God we had a good buyer, and I think they acted with transparency as did we. But, you know, there were points where we were like, this thing might not come together, and we've already invested a lot in this exit. So yeah, I don't know if that answers the question, but I don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) It does. But I want to dive a little bit deeper into tactical things. You seem like a pretty healthy, fit person. Do you find that exercise helps with the stress? In those stressful moments, do you have a routine that you fall back on? You're like, wow, this is one of those moments, and so I need to hit the gym and do that. How do you deal with the stress?

(Rich Aberman at 00:14:31) Yeah. I don't know if I'm a good example of someone that's done that in a healthy way. I feel very much that, and I'm not proud of this, I think my co-founder is a good counterexample. But I think I, to some extent, mortgaged my personal emotional and physical health, certainly over the past five or six years as we ended up here. I don't think it has anything to do with the acquisition in terms of giving me the space and the luxury to invest in that stuff, but that was a nice point in time that I could point to and say, okay, that, at least, was a shock to the system where now I'm committed to recovering a lot of my youthful health that I feel like I've lost over the past couple years. My co-founder is very different. But I think he coped with the stress and the anxiety a lot better than I did and never wore it on his sleeve.

(Rich Aberman at 00:15:17) Maybe internalized it in ways that none of us can see. But I think one of the things that made him a better CEO than I would have been, and I think well prepared for that role, was his ability to kind of take in stride a personal toll with perspective and compartmentalize that. I think I kind of wore it out of my sleeve a little too much. So I appreciate the compliment. I hide it very well, but I don't think—I think if I was giving advice to a younger me or a first-time entrepreneur going through something similar, it's like the one thing you don't get back, or the one thing that's harder to get back, is health. And the one thing you definitely never get back is time. And so I don't think there's any amount of success that's worth mortgaging those things, nor do I think it helps.

(Rich Aberman at 00:16:00) I don't think sacrificing those things bolstered our chances of success. I almost think it was just my inability to find healthy and appropriate coping mechanisms. I kind of retreated into the company and into the anxiety of that, but feel pretty good now. I think we're coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) I love your self-awareness too, man. It's on point. I noticed that the room—the conference room that you're in—is called Hubbard. Is there some interesting naming convention for the conference rooms there?

(Rich Aberman at 00:16:27) Yeah. We went through a few. The original ones that we had years ago in our first office were names of different international currencies. The second one was Harry Potter locations. And this one is famous mountains.

(Rich Aberman at 00:16:42) And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:43) Oh, I like it.

(Rich Aberman at 00:16:43) And actually, we named the conference rooms before the acquisition, but the theme post-acquisition was this mountain that we're trying to scale. So what does the summit look like? And part of that was the hokiness of founders saying, "Look, this is the beginning. We're at base camp, not the end. So buckle up. We're in for a ride. This is not the exit. This is the entrance." And part of it, I think, is authentic. You know, we do have a summit that we want to apply. We want to be market leaders in small business and integrated payments.

(Rich Aberman at 00:17:11) That's the summit. And I think it's a scalable, achievable summit in a relatively short time window because of the acquisition. We're on a much bigger platform now. I think we bring assets to the table. JPMorgan brings assets to the table. And I think if we combine those in the right way and we execute on our plan, kind of the thesis of the acquisition, I think you can look at the maps in our conference rooms. I think we will hit the top of that mountain. Whether it's twelve months or eighteen or twenty-four, we'll hit it. And we have milestones along the way that we call out publicly. Every conference room—not this one because this is where we do public stuff—but that's kind of our roadmap. And then the natural question is, that's not the end either.

(Rich Aberman at 00:17:51) What's the summit that comes after that? So not to ramble, but this is something I'm personally very passionate about. At the acquisition, we set out a three-year roadmap to scale to the top of our mountain. Top of the mountain being we are a market leader in merchant services or payment processing for small businesses. And we understand that to win in that market, you have to also win in the integrated space. Meaning, payments is not some standalone product that's sold to small businesses anymore. It's integrated into their point-of-sale systems. It's integrated into their e-commerce platforms. It's integrated into their accounting and invoicing solutions. So that's our mountain that we want to climb.

(Rich Aberman at 00:18:29) And I think to keep me around in a natural extension of WePay's roadmap, and I think the strategy of the broader firm, is how do you expand that kind of payment strategy to include all of retail banking? So it's not just payments from Chase being integrated into your point-of-sale system. It's the entire suite of financial products that you get as part of a holistic banking experience. How does that work better with the software that you use to run your business? That to me is the next summit, really reinventing retail banking, taking it to the twenty-first century, saying branches and physical brick-and-mortar locations of the bank and the brand are all still going to be relevant.

(Rich Aberman at 00:19:08) But going into the twenty-first century, it's not enough. It's much more about an integrated, open API strategy and how we allow the bank to work better with the whole ecosystem of third-party platforms and developers. And I think that that will be the next summit that we try to find.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:22) That's exciting. I was talking with Amex—you're in—you said you're in New York, right?

(Rich Aberman at 00:19:28) We're in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:29) Oh, you're in San Francisco. I think when your PR person got on the phone, she was in New York. But anyways, I was talking with, in New York, CTO or the vice president of engineering for Amex, and they're doing really cool things with their platform and the ability to issue Amex points.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) I don't know if you guys do anything with them, but if you ever want an introduction, I'd be more than happy to make that.

(Rich Aberman at 00:19:56) Yeah. I might take you up on that. We work closely with them in a lot of ways. But I think it's not—I don't think there are founders and entrepreneurs and executives that are able to kind of prophetically see the way the world's going to be or the way the world should be. And they spend their entire careers imposing that vision upon the universe. And you could probably count those folks on one or two hands, right? Steve Jobs probably fits in that category. Elon Musk probably fits in that category. We do not.

(Rich Aberman at 00:20:23) So I think for us, we had some natural starting point based on our own kind of life experiences that was fairly limited, both in terms of its importance and in terms of the time horizon on which we were able to think through it. But I think after twelve years of beating our heads against the wall, we have a kind of deeply informed opinion of where our market and industry is going to go and the role that we could play in that and how it's valuable to the market, to our customers. And the time horizon on which we're able to think about that and the ambition of the role that we think we can play in it has grown pretty dramatically. That's kind of where we are. And so, integrated payments—where the epiphany was payments is no longer a standalone

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:03) A standalone—

(Rich Aberman at 00:21:05) product and a standalone business. It's a feature of the software that you're already using to run your business. That was not an original vision, but it was one that I think we identified very early and embraced and executed on fairly well. I think the same is true as we think about more broader integrated or open banking. We didn't invent that concept. I think it's, at this point, fairly universally accepted from all the legacy players out there or traditional players out there like Amex, like JPMorgan, and something that a ton of fintechs are raising billions of dollars to go pursue. But I think our perspective on it and the assets that we bring to bear, I think, uniquely qualify us to win in that world. And so it's not surprising that Amex and I think other major banks are focused on it. I think it's validating to some extent. And so the question for us is, what's our race and what race do we want to run, and how do we win it?

(Rich Aberman at 00:21:59) And I'm feeling pretty good. Feel pretty invigorated by the spot that we're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:02) I like you guys. I like your energy and your attitude, and you're obviously doing something right. I was—I pulled our mailing list asking them what they wanted to hear about, what they wanted me to ask you, things like that. And one of the ones that came up was about digital identity verification, like anti-fraud, in a millisecond, things like that. Have you guys had to build that type of stuff?

(Rich Aberman at 00:22:29) We've leveraged it, and we've built, I think, peripheral capabilities, capitalizing on a lot of the security things that other folks have built. So an example is our way of authenticating customers has evolved beyond the password. We still rely on it, but we've leveraged a whole series of third-party technologies to make that easier, from facial recognition to authenticate through your iPhone, to machine fingerprinting to make sure that you don't just have a password, but you're using a device that'll be recognized. I would say what's exciting for me, even as just an audience in the industry, is historically, you had, call it, two axes between kind of the level of security that you can achieve and the experience of the customer. And so the more security you get—asking more questions, having more authentication protocols that you leverage—the more you degrade the customer experience.

(Rich Aberman at 00:23:25) And so you're making this trade-off between how confident do you want to be that the other person on the end of this machine is who they say they are versus how much are you willing to degrade the experience for good users. And so you had this efficiency frontier where it's this direct trade-off between the two. And I think what's exciting is now that frontier has been pushed out, where you have mechanisms now that are both more secure and more reliable and a better experience for your customers. And that's pretty profound. For me, a year ago, it was unbelievable that I could open up my phone and just start using it without having to use even my fingerprint because it does facial recognition.

(Rich Aberman at 00:24:05) So biometrics four years ago from an iPhone with a fingerprint was transformative. And now it's getting better every day. The fact that on my laptop now I can use my fingerprint to open it up as opposed to putting in a passcode is both easier and more secure because it's leveraging something that's unique to me versus something that I uniquely know. So I think it's going to have a profound impact on our industry. I look at fraud as an ever-present problem that will never go away. But it seems like the defense is growing in sophistication as fast or faster, for the first time, than the offense. That the tools that we have at our disposal to protect ourselves and our customers were inconceivable—at least seeing them in practice—ten years ago. And now it's super exciting to be able to leverage those tools. We haven't invented ourselves any kind of new biometric capability or recognition software. But I think we incorporate it and leverage it in really creative ways that help us deliver much better experiences to our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) Yeah. I had on Rob, who's CEO of Okta or Okta. Have you heard of them before? They're—I think they're in Seattle. But they were actually a divestiture of White Pages. Do you remember White Pages?

(Rich Aberman at 00:25:16) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) Yeah. So they had all this data about where people lived and their phone numbers and their patterns and all this stuff, and they ended up building essentially an anti-digital identity verification, anti-fraud API with all their data, and they spun out of White Pages and became, you know, Okta.

(Rich Aberman at 00:25:37) Yeah. I guess it's another theme. I kind of honed in right away on new software capabilities to kind of authenticate identity. But I think you're tapping into another one, which is there's always been a massive amount of data, but it's the accessibility and availability of that data which is relatively unique today. And I think part of that is just building kind of an open API ecosystem, where information has historically lived in offline silos is now living in online accessible databases. And I think to the extent we or third-party fraud solutions can leverage that data, I think there's definitely ways that we can use it to better protect against fraud and data breaches and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:19) Well, if you listen to any episode, I would listen to the first ten minutes of Rob's episode because he's just—I don't know. I don't think I laughed that hard in any of the 200 interviews I've done. The guy was just hilarious, and he was really—he's like a nuclear—he used to be a nuclear submarine operator for the Navy, in the Navy. And then he came out and he did a startup, and then he ended up going to White Pages and then becoming the CEO of the divestiture. But just, like, all-around awesome human.

(Rich Aberman at 00:26:50) Oh, it's good to hear. I will definitely listen to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:52) I think in this industry, you've got to have a sense of humor just to get through the day-to-day. So it's good to hear.

(Rich Aberman at 00:26:57) I am curious—as the chief strategy officer, that's your official title, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:01) Yeah.

(Rich Aberman at 00:27:02) So what does your team look like? Or what do your responsibilities look like?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:06) Yeah. I also—I think titles in startups are always a little bit of a joke. So I'm happy to talk about my responsibilities today. Actually, the title is chief strategy officer. I'm also head of product, so I run the product organization.

(Rich Aberman at 00:27:22) Oh, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) My team looks like a bunch of product managers and supporting functions and, you know, program management. We have a design team as well. So that's kind of my day-to-day function, is product management, I guess. A couple things worth noting. One is, at a product or a technology company, I don't know the difference between product strategy and non-product strategy. It's all product strategy. And to be—I think one of the advantages that a smaller company has is that you can kind of marry strategy and execution in a way that's a lot more intimate than in a much larger company that has much more complexity organizationally and operates on a much longer time horizon. So I think there are sub-tech companies that do it really well, but inevitably, as you get larger, there is this kind of divergence of strategy and execution. And I think it's kind of one of the big questions that we have is how do we make sure those two things are tied together.

(Rich Aberman at 00:28:15) Historically, we haven't had to deal with that. We've had the luxury of being a 200-person company where your founder, one of your founders, your chief strategy officer, and your head of product are all the same person, and you can get your entire product and engineering team in one conference room. So that's one quick thought. I think the other one is I wasn't the CEO. My co-founder was the CEO, and deservedly so. And I wasn't a computer scientist or engineer by trade or experience. And so I think it's tempting for founders that fit that profile—where they can't really put a finger on their skill set, in part because they're probably too young and inexperienced to have a real one—assume that they're product people or they have a sense of design. And I think I fell into that trap because it was an easy way to define my role because the skills necessary to succeed there, I thought, were relatively soft skills. In practice, I think over the twelve—I've learned product management is as much a science as it is an art.

(Rich Aberman at 00:29:10) And there's a real technical skill set that I think great product managers consistently have. And I wouldn't consider myself a great product manager. I think great product managers come from organizations that have great product management, and they work under mentors that are great product managers. And so I've now had the luxury, twelve years into it, to at least identify my deficiencies and the luxury to kind of hire my own mentors. And so at this point in my career, I'm kind of confident in my skill set, the ability to lead and manage.

(Rich Aberman at 00:29:46) So I'm able to say this from a place of confidence versus insecurity, but I think the least qualified classically trained product manager in my organization. And the folks that I'm learning from and my mentors and the folks that are helping me develop my technical skill set in that function are people that we hired out of great organizations that have great product teams, that have worked for great product managers in the past. And so my title is Head of Product, and I lead a team of product managers. But I think I do that from a depth of knowledge of our industry, our market, our customers, and not from a place of having the requisite skill set to be a great product manager.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) Yes. You can have the mindset of your customers in the room.

(Rich Aberman at 00:30:33) Yeah. And some might argue that that's the number one trait of a product manager is knowing your customers in the market. I think it's a very, very important trait for a great product manager, but necessary, not sufficient. What would be sufficient is rounding that out with the ability to understand the underlying technology, the ability to plan effectively, to understand ROI trade-offs, to create an appropriate product design requirements document, to iterate on that in an agile environment. So I'm not an expert on what makes a great product manager, but I don't think it's enough just to know the market. You have to be a trained product manager. And I think it's been a learning experience for me to appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) And I love the advice of hiring your mentors because it's kind of counterintuitive. You don't imagine that that's a possibility, but having that mindset is pretty awesome.

(Rich Aberman at 00:31:26) Oh, yeah. That's the biggest benefit of founding a company that gains some momentum is that you can pick who you want to learn from. And it's always an interesting dynamic when you're hiring people that have more life experience, more professional experience, a deeper technical skill set. And I think one is to acknowledge that and appreciate it, and from a place of confidence, understand what value you bring to the table and your unique perspective. And the other is to shy away from it and to hire people that you don't consider your mentors and folks that you feel like you can easily manage because you're their senior. And I think that's the wrong way to build a business and run a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) I agree. I like to, when I'm going into a new market or something new that I don't understand, which happens a lot, I'll look for authors in that area that write content on how they're doing what they're doing. Because at a minimum, they can articulate their ideas and they can have the persistence to publish a book. And so I'll look, and then I'll go, they're available. You can hire them as consultants. You can sell them on the idea and hire them full time, or you can bring them in just to learn how to identify the people that have the best traits in that industry and how to hire those correct types of individuals. But, yeah, that's one of the things that I picked up by accident because I just read this book once, and I was like, well, I'll just email the author because I had a question, and then he responded to me. And then I said, hey, if I buy you coffee, will you come meet with me? And he's like, yeah. And then I realized that one of the greatest things we have with technology and transportation and speed is that we can get a book or a piece of content, learn from it, and then engage with the creator of that content in real time. You couldn't do that in the sixteen hundreds.

(Rich Aberman at 00:33:12) Yeah. No. You're right. That's a really good insight. And especially where books were printed and shipped years later, and now there's just this ubiquity of information and accessibility with the people that create it. I like that. That's a good insight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) So as we get, like, New Year, right? Everyone's really pumped for the New Year. I know you mentioned you had a three-year plan. But if you were to say there's one driving factor that gets you up out of bed in the morning that gets you excited about going into work, what would that be?

(Rich Aberman at 00:33:43) Yeah. I think I'm always excited. For me, the exciting part of the job is always the next product release. And that might even be a little bit myopic, but that's what we're doing day to day—we're developing technology and product. And if you're not excited about seeing that thing come to life and for people to use it in the real world and to release it into the wilderness, I don't know what you're doing. And, you know, it's never—I'm very, very excited about our two, three-year mission. I think by serendipity alone, we ended up in this market and in this industry, and I think I've now grown up with it. And it's—my entire worldview is informed by integrated payments and banking and SaaS companies that we're integrated with. And I love it, man. It's intellectually stimulating. I love sparring with our product managers on the best way to attack it. I love engaging with our customers on what challenges they're having and what solutions we can develop. But for me, the number one motivating thing is the release that's coming in a month and a half, and I just can't wait for it to roll out. And then a month after it rolls out, I'm gonna look at it in all its warts and begin to slowly hate it and get really excited about replacing it with a release after that. I think that's the cycle. And it can't be too different from someone that paints or writes or has any other creative expression, where it's that cathartic moment where it's out and you love it for all of twenty-four hours, and then you slowly start to see it as a stale piece of legacy that you want to kill and replace. So I think that's the creative cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:19) Yeah. It's like familiarity breeds contempt. Right? You write something, you love it, you put it out in the world. It's just you know it so much, and it's, like, it could be better. But that also is a sign that I've only picked up in very successful people. So that's one of my personal identifiers for successful people. When you look at past work and you're like, you know, that could have been a hundred times better, because the realization of that means you've grown since your work was created.

(Rich Aberman at 00:35:46) Yeah. I love that. For me, it's as people adopt, recognize, appreciate, and fall in love with your creation, at that pinnacle, you're halfway through your cycle of beginning to hate it and replace it. And that's probably the right cadence. Right? Because it takes time to tear down and replace. And so if you're well on your journey of tearing down and replacing when people are peaking in terms of their adoption and love of this technology, you're probably on the right cadence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) So as we start to wrap up, I know you mentioned you're growing and you're hiring a lot. We have a lot of technology people, product people, engineering, technology leaders—the whole spectrum. Do you have a careers page on your website? What's the URL?

(Evelyn (PR/Communications person from WePay) at 00:36:32) Wepay.com/careers.

(Rich Aberman at 00:36:34) Yeah. Wepay.com/careers. And, you know, WePay still maintains its own hiring, recruiting, autonomous culture. But I think where we're beneficial, we're blending that with roles across the firm. You know, not a ton of success stories of big banks gobbling up technology companies and realizing the full potential of the acquisition. I think we want to write that story in that playbook, but we acknowledge that we don't really know what it is, and we're gonna do it on the move. So we've begun to cross-pollinate roles to see how that plays out. But currently, WePay is still very much focused on hiring for our own seats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:18) Excellent. So we'll put that link in the show notes too so people can check it out.

(Evelyn (PR/Communications person from WePay) at 00:37:23) New campus.

(Rich Aberman at 00:37:24) New campus. No. I got Evelyn feeding me things that we gotta plug. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:29) Yeah. Anything else? Let's get a list of things to plug. We got new campus.

(Rich Aberman at 00:37:31) We got a new campus. So we're building this massive, modern, beautiful campus right in the heart of Palo Alto, which we're very excited about. I think it's JPMorgan putting their money where their mouth is in terms of investing here. What else we got? Oh, what are we missing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:47) It's—

(Rich Aberman at 00:37:48) So we had a board member from JPMorgan Chase here the other day, and I'm not gonna mention his name or her name. I'll leave that open. But they had the best comment. They said, I mean this more in terms of mentality than actual geography, but they're asking all the right questions in New York, and they're coming up with all the right answers in Silicon Valley. And I thought that was just classic. And I think it was less, again, about New York versus East Coast, West Coast and a lot more about finance and money management and technology. And so I think J.P. Morgan as a firm recognizes that the winds are blowing in the technology direction, and I think they're investing billions of dollars from the pragmatic—buying WePay, building a new campus—to the, you know, let's sponsor the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco so we got our name out there today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:36) Those marketing professionals are writing angry letters. Branding is everything.

(Rich Aberman at 00:38:41) I said, uh, what was the other comment that came up? I was like, wow, you guys have spent $2 billion in marketing. She's like, no, we've invested $2 billion in marketing.

(Evelyn (PR/Communications person from WePay) at 00:38:50) JPMC actually has an annual $11.4 billion investing in technology, which is part of the Silicon Valley campus that we're gonna build up.

(Rich Aberman at 00:38:59) Yeah. There's over $10 billion a year invested in technology, which is just a magnitude and a scale that we've never seen, which I guess is a luxury to have if you're making $100 million in profit post-tax a day. We, as a wholly owned subsidiary, are not quite there yet, but we're on our way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) I believe in you guys.

(Rich Aberman at 00:39:22) Stay tuned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) This has been absolutely fantastic. And next time I'm out in the San Francisco, Palo Alto area, I'll give you a ring, shoot you a text. It'll be on our list, and maybe we'll hang out, see the new offices, just say hello. I like to meet cool people.

(Rich Aberman at 00:39:39) Yeah. Would love to. I'll buy you a beer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) Awesome, man. Cool.

(Evelyn (PR/Communications person from WePay) at 00:39:42) Awesome. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) Have a fantastic day. Thank you again so much. Bye.