Jean-Denis Greze - Head of Engineering at Plaid

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Jean-Denis, the head of engineering at Plaid, and we discuss optimizing your teams for impact and treating them right in the long term, thoughts on privacy engineering, and how they've operationalized employee mobility within their organization. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Hello. Hello.

(Jean-Denis at 00:00:36) Hi, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Excellent. How are you doing today, bud?

(Jean-Denis at 00:00:40) I'm great. It's game one of the World Series today, and I was talking to Jake for a few seconds before, and he's a Rays fan and I'm a Dodgers fan. So we may not be best friends, but I'm always excited about the end of a baseball season where I get to root for one of the teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) You guys taking any bets over here preshow?

(Jean-Denis at 00:01:01) No. I don't think so. I don't want any jinxing or reverse jinxing or anything, so I'm just gonna try to live in the moment. How are you? You're not a sports fan, are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) I played sports growing up. So I played baseball for about eight years. I played some football in high school. And then the one sport that I like to watch in person is hockey.

(Jean-Denis at 00:01:27) Oh, very cool. But you never played?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) Never played hockey, no.

(Jean-Denis at 00:01:33) How did you get into it? Why do you like it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) Well, one of my business partners took me to a hockey game, and I typically had not liked to watch baseball. I enjoyed playing it, but I did not like to watch it. I thought it was just slow. And then when I went to watch hockey, they're all chasing this puck and it's very fast. There is a lot going on. And so that just for some reason met the needs of my attention span and kept me engaged and watching the whole time. I think it was a Buffalo Sabres game, was the first game I had ever watched.

(Jean-Denis at 00:02:07) Okay. Very cool. Yeah. I miss, as I get into my forties, I think the playing of sports is becoming more and more dangerous and happening less and less. I always liked team sports just because I think it brings a lot of interesting dynamics between people to the forefront over a very short period of time with a really fast feedback cycle. And then, yeah, as I've gotten older, I've turned oddly into a fan. Even though I was like you for a long time, I just didn't enjoy watching sports. I enjoyed playing them, but now I just live vicariously through others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) Right. Sports will do that. Raising kids will do that. There's a lot of situations in life that you can put yourself in that give you all sorts of interesting leadership slash life lessons.

(Jean-Denis at 00:02:55) Yeah. On the raising kids, I have a one-year-old. He's actually 13 months. I'm trying not to be a manager with him, but I really see myself thinking of him as someone who reports to me, and I'm like, wow, this is just not the right mental model for this situation. So going back to first principles and figuring out how to be a great dad is quite a life experience. Really enjoying it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) When you watch them start to walk and fall and get down and overcome, those things are good moments. I've got a three-year-old and a 1.5-year-old, so I'm right in there with you, bud.

(Jean-Denis at 00:03:29) Yeah. He's developing a personality. At least he sleeps at night, but opinions are being shared, just not with the human language. So it's a little bit difficult to know what's happening, but yeah, I enjoy it. I just wonder, you're talking about incentives a little bit and trying to think about, do I want him to hurt himself walking around, or is it kind of hurting that's not good? And the typical manager mindset is like, what are the incentives? What will he be optimizing for? And I'm like, what am I thinking about? I just love him. He's my son. It's good to have him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) I don't know. Everyone always has so much advice whether you're becoming a new manager or becoming a parent. And I found that it's interesting to hear the advice and it can help at times, but there's nothing that can actually walk you through the experience other than going through it.

(Jean-Denis at 00:04:24) Yeah. Management's interesting. There's no shortcuts. I think you can't condense ten years of managing people into a year. It's just like, you're gonna have the person who does amazing work, who doesn't get along with other people in the team, right? And there's different ways to manage that. And it depends on that person's personality. So there's no generic advice there. It's like, what's the work? What's your relationship with that person? How critical are they? How open are they to feedback? Do you draw a hard line in the sand? Do you coach them towards a better working model? Do you isolate them so that they can still do great work without grating on the rest of the team? There's no solutions, no advice that's gonna help you make that except to do it and see what works for you, how you're good at motivating people, and so on and so forth. And you need for every kind of management position, you kind of need multiple times of doing it until you figure out the playbook that's good for you. So, yeah, it's humbling when you think back and you look at all the mistakes that you made and all the trust that people put in you to figure out these situations when you realize it was the first time I dealt with that. And I had to kind of pretend that I knew a way out that would work for everybody. But that's what makes it exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) And that's why I find that principles are important in play, like where the person's heart is and how they see the world through. When I realized, looking back, people that invested in me and believed in me earlier when I was too young or now I would say that was a silly move. But one of the things that I've come around to see is that they probably saw some underlying principles in me that created that trust that I wasn't even aware of.

(Jean-Denis at 00:06:13) At the time, it felt natural that they would trust you. It's only when you look back that you realize we were walking on a plank with not a lot of support. Yeah. So you just got me thinking about some mentors or some people that I had back in the day that trusted me with things, and then trying to think, am I trusting people on my team enough? Do I go internal or do I go external and look for other people? And it's just a very interesting dilemma.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) Yeah. The familiarity breeds contempt thing is a difficult universal law to overcome. It's pretty hard because you, as humans, in order to make sense of the world, we have to categorize and organize and put things in boxes. At the same time, those boxes are always being broken, and so it's a constant game.

(Jean-Denis at 00:07:06) Yep. At Plaid right now, engineering's a little bit over 200 people. So it's way beyond the size where I know what anybody's work is anymore. I just don't know what an individual contributor is working on and so on and so forth. What's really dangerous is I remember when the team was 50 people just a couple of years ago, and so I have the boxes. I put the people in the boxes from a couple of years ago, and those are not the right boxes anymore. People have grown. People have new skills. And so I just have to remove myself totally from the process because if anything, the data that I bring to the table is very, very stale. And that's a lesson that I've learned in my career, where you can get in this mindset where you forget how much people can grow and how much people can learn. Because there'll be periods where they don't seem like they're learning. They've plateaued, and they fail at the same thing a few times, and then suddenly something clicks or they get the right mentorship or the right leader or the right opportunity, and then they uptick. And then now they've got a different frontier, a different set of things that they can achieve. But if you don't see that uptick, if you're like me, you're too removed from it, it can be quite dangerous to remember them as what they were. So I've learned that lesson. I don't wanna teach it necessarily to my managers in all cases, because I learned it through making mistakes, like underestimating what people could do and then having them maybe be frustrated and leave the team or wanna get a different manager or wanna work at a different company. And I think over time, I can think of cases where I was too trusting and got burned and then cases where I wasn't trusting enough or didn't believe enough in individual's potential and missed out on people who are great, just because I couldn't create the right situation for them to succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:00) I've been seeing a lot of companies talk about moving within the organization, moving around to different teams. And we've had that happen here at my company. We're much smaller. We're only like ten, fifteen people. But that did happen here, and it was really interesting to watch somebody that was a direct report go under a new manager and then get different perspective, and then you just you can learn. You can learn a lot from that. And I've been talking to a lot of different people about how they moved around throughout their career. And it seems like when the company has the ability to move within the organization, they tend to stay there and move around in different jobs. But when they can't, they tend to go to companies who will see them because the recruiters are incentivized financially to be like, you deserve more, and it's time for your next role. And we've got this position over here, and you rise to the level of your incompetence type deal, and you need to make this career move. And it's been fascinating for me meeting all these companies and then visiting them and all of that and seeing the different cultures and how that plays out and a larger view of the organization and then the market itself.

(Jean-Denis at 00:10:10) Yeah. We've operationalized that. So we have, once you get to fifteen to eighteen months on a team, your manager is supposed to tell you, hey, you really should go do something else. It could be, you know, if you really wanna be an SRE or a backend engineer, maybe it's still within those domains, but just for a different manager. But more often, trying to ask someone who's full stack, be like, do you wanna be a little more product engineering? Do you wanna work on a different platform? Do you wanna go down or up the stack? Do you wanna work on a team that's experimental, building quickly versus a team that has more of a long-term set of goals and strategic vision that lasts a couple of years? Trying to promote that a lot. What's interesting is even though we promote it, we really have to push sometimes for people to move. And I think you're right. It's a great way to learn, and it's a great way to keep people at the company because the problem is they may not realize when they get stale on something. And when they get stale, their reaction might be to look outside. And, you know, people are entitled to go work wherever they want to. Obviously, people should do what's best for them and for their careers. But I think in some cases, the company is failing people by not providing them an opportunity that matches up with the way they could or would wanna grow. That being said, it's much easier when you're growing fast because people can move anywhere because we're hiring so much that I can fill the gaps with new hires. Do you know what I mean? Like, if half of my backend team wanted to do product work over six to twelve months, I could accommodate that because we're hiring enough. I think once you get bigger organizations, organizations that don't have as much headcount growth, also the roles are more specialized. They need specialists to be successful. You can't just put a generalist in a thing and expect the thing to go well anymore. It just naturally, the organizations make it structurally more difficult for people to move, or companies that don't have the same hiring bar across everywhere where there's a view that, oh, they're really good product engineers over there, but maybe not that good infrastructure engineers. And so then you don't necessarily allow a lot of people to move. But I've always worked at companies, fewer than 2,000 people, and I think it's always been a matter of pride at those places to facilitate the movement. So that's really cool that you have that even at 15. Because, generally, when you're smaller, the pressure is just like, too many things to build, not enough people, can't afford to even think about growth and providing opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) Yeah. We just got out of the stage of trying not to drown. And now we're in the, one of the big takeaways I found from all of that is, and you've been in startups, so you'll get it, the chaos is a sign that you haven't figured out what works yet.

(Jean-Denis at 00:12:56) So you feel like you figured out what works?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) We figured out what works. Yeah. That unique feeling of living through it for a year to two years of like, let's wake up and refocus and try something new, and let's figure it out. And then it finally clicking and then realizing that, okay, now we have something. Now we have to switch our mindset to slow, steady, consistent improvements upon this known model and figure out how to scale it. And that's a whole different animal. And it's tough because you wanna keep that, I'm sure we're experiencing probably similar things, but at different scales because you were just talking about employees and being able to move them around. And as you go up to the executive team, that becomes a lot harder. It's way easier for you to give mobility to some of your entry-level engineers rather than your direct report team. It's so much more work. You have to figure out maybe a new role, a new title, a new activity for them. How do you do that? How do you keep the mobility going with your direct reports?

(Jean-Denis at 00:14:02) You're asking me a tough question. Yeah. I feel, at Plaid, the reality is I feel fairly lucky that most of my direct reports see themselves doing what they're doing for the next few years. And so I don't feel the pressure from them to experience something else. I think they've created or I've created with them the roles that they really want that provide them the growth that they want, but also the impact. I think I view it kind of differently. I view it more as, what's right for the business? What's the impact that I could have if I had some of my direct reports do something different?

(Jean-Denis at 00:14:44) And I think, you know, that's a classic tension, which is when what is right for the business is no longer the exact same thing as what might be right for the individual in that moment, or at least how they perceive what they want for their career and what is the most important project for the business. I'll give you a micro example, but then I'll go back to my reports, which is, you know, project management is not the most exciting aspect of what a technical lead might do. Right? They might be more interested in technical strategy and architecture, those kinds of things. But, you know, if you're a tech lead for five or six people working on something, project management is really key.

(Jean-Denis at 00:15:24) Right? There's a lot of things happening at once. But you might have trouble over time asking that your more senior engineers are really great at that to do it because they're gonna be like, I've done it before. Right? But you need it for the business because you need really, really good project management.

(Jean-Denis at 00:15:37) So, you know, one thing we've done at Plaid always is say, in the short term, we'd always do what's right for the business. In the long term, we do what's right for your career. And so every time I Plaid, I've had to have a conversation which is, like, I need this manager or this tech lead or this IC to do work that's not perfect for them, but it's clearly more important for the business than whatever they're doing at this point in time. People respect it because they know the company looks out for them in the longer term. And so I think if you look at my more senior managers or my directors, right at this moment, I don't have this dilemma, but when I've had it in the past, I've always been able to say, like, hey, this team over there, it needs you. Or these two managers, they need you to help them step up. They need you to go and do this thing, and this is why it's right for the business. And people have had to trust that the next decision will be one that aligns both the business and exactly what they want for their career. And I've been lucky.

(Jean-Denis at 00:16:31) Like, I've been had to make long term decisions that put someone in a role they don't want for, you know, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months because that's really, really tough. Right? And sometimes you have to do it, and then you realize, actually, that person is not the right person for that role. Not because they don't have the skills, but because it doesn't excite them or it doesn't align with the future that they want. And always, I think the best managers, what they do is someone's great on your team, but it's no longer the right thing for their life. Right? Your job as a great manager is to be like, hey, I'm gonna help you find a role out there. I'm gonna, you know, it's like, maybe this is no longer the right company for you, not because you're not successful, because we just don't have the growth opportunity that you really want. But you're awesome, and you deserve to find that, and let me go out there and help you get it.

(Jean-Denis at 00:17:16) And I've done that a few times, and, actually, some of the best leaders I've worked with helped me find my next gig. And, yeah, I wanna pay that one forward over and over again. So I don't know if that fully answers it, but it's I think that's the impact mindset that if you have on your team, it makes these things much easier. But you have to have a lot of trust. Right? You can't lie to people. You can't tell people, like, hey, go do this thing that you don't really wanna do, and then leave them there and don't follow through six months with the opportunity that matches up their specific needs or their specific wants.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) Yeah. It comes back to the character of the leader. Right? It's why it's so important when you're building an executive team, the people that you have on it having the same view or the same lens or the same understanding of where you're going. And I read an article you wrote a little bit about talking about putting the mission of the company or the purpose of the company ahead of the growth of the individual. And I don't know if I worded that exactly correctly, but could you talk a little bit about that?

(Jean-Denis at 00:18:20) Yeah. I mean, I think, look, we're building businesses. You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, we are successful as teams and as individuals if we build successful businesses. You might have to solve hard technical problems to do that, hard management problems, hard product problems. But, you know, if you build a great team that works really well, but you're not having end of day business impact, no one's gonna feel really good. Right? So I think behind that for me is you need people who are really excited about the mission and the impact of the company, and they understand that's the ultimate thing by which success is rated. Right? But and that's really important in the moment. That's the short term, long term. Like, short term, you really want people in that mindset because short term, you always have to make lots of optimizations that are around getting more impact. Right? And if that's tough, if people fight you on that, if people are not aligned with the business impact, it's just real tough. Right?

So perfect example is the person who just wants to work on really hard technical problems. What if you get to a point in your growth where you have no hard technical problems? Right? Like, you don't really truly have unique hard technical problems. This person is a great engineer. Right? You want them to be able to get, like, I get it. This isn't quite as hard, but I can do it faster and better than other people, and that's really impactful for the business. I'm gonna go and do it. I'm gonna do it really well, really fast, and I'm gonna challenge myself not because it's a hard problem. I challenge myself because I can do it faster than others. Right? That's a great mindset. But sometimes you get that person and you can't adapt their mindset. They're like, no. I wanna work on distributed system blah blah blah. I wanna work on, right? And you're like, we don't need that right now. Right?

So that's the part for me where I really want people to internalize the mission and the impact of the business first. But as a leader, right, what's important is long term, I'm never gonna keep that team together and motivated if I don't also give them what they want out of their lives. Right? You only get one life on Earth. Right? We're all gonna live, hopefully, to 90 or a 100. Right? A year is not a lot of time. It's 1% of your life. Right? If you're gonna work a year on something that you don't love, that you don't enjoy, right, as a leader, if I'm gonna ask somebody to do that, man, I better the next year after that give them the perfect thing. Because it's that person's life, and they only get one of them here. And I talk about that with my teams, and we have very direct conversations with people when we have to make those trade-offs.

(Jean-Denis at 00:20:39) And I give a speech to all new managers who join Plaid. I give a training about this, which is we're optimizing for impact, and that's great, but you have to treat your team right in the long term. Right? And you also, you know, there's a you have a duty with recruiting. Right? Don't recruit people with skills that don't match what the business needs. Right? Recruit people who do have that impact mindset. If they don't, it's fine. Go work somewhere else. There's plenty of other great companies in tech. That's the wonderful thing. So I think if you're honest like that about the importance of the mission, but you're also a steward for people's careers, I think as a leader, that puts you in a really good place. I'm not saying sometimes you don't have hard decisions. Right? Because sometimes you can't find the perfect work or whatnot, but you're coming to it from a place of trust and empathy and aligned values around the mission and impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:28) Dan, I like how you were talking about aligning with purpose, essentially. So if they are the engineer that likes to work on hard problems, but maybe you really, really need them over here to maybe instill good habits within this team, because not only do they solve problems, but they happen to be really adept at building good habits, then them being on that mission with that purpose is, you know, and then you showing them that perspective and allowing them to see that, that's very useful. I don't know exactly how to wrap that one up, but it's a useful thing just to see or to know that that can happen because otherwise, you could write it off. You could just say, oh, they only wanna work on hard problems. We're gonna have to get rid of them and find someone else. And it's like you didn't even know it was an option to try to change perspective or show them a different side of the coin.

(Jean-Denis at 00:22:17) Yeah. Or you just you did a nice little judo move. Right? Because what you're also talking about is you kind of wanna explain to the person that there are other ways to have impact, other ways to use their skills than in the one way that they've conceptualized, which is, in this case, teaching other people. Right? Or getting a team as a whole to embody the set of things that you're already really good at. And that's super power. I think for me, that comes from someone who really wants to have more impact. Because if they wanna have more impact, then they think about scaling themselves. Right? And then creating culture elsewhere, mentoring others, passing on your skills, those are ways to be more impactful in the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:56) Yeah. What's the big mission for Plaid?

(Jean-Denis at 00:23:00) We're rewording it right now, so I have to make sure not to scoop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:04) We need the legacy version.

(Jean-Denis at 00:23:06) Yeah. I mean, look, the short version is we wanna make money easier for everyone in the world. And the way we achieve that mission is by making it easier for developers to build apps in the financial system, like fintech apps. And I think, you know, we're seeing a couple of big trends overall. So, obviously, there's been a ton of new fintech companies in the last decade in the United States. And most of fintech is about really risk, actually. Right? It's about, like, loan lending is about risk. Moving money around is around risk. Like, is that really that person's bank account? Is it a fraudulent transfer? And so on and so forth. Giving financial advice is about understanding the goals that people have in their life and finding a as least risky way for people to be able to achieve those financial goals, buying a car, buying a house, saving for retirement, putting money aside for your kids.

So we wanna make all these kind of risk-based activities easier for consumers, but we don't build the end user experiences at Plaid. Right? What we do is we build an integration on top of the financial system so that apps like Venmo or Acorns or Dave or Robinhood can exist, either by making it easier for them to move money around using ACH rails or making it easier for them to access someone's spending history so that they can give them advice, so they can issue a loan to them, and so on and so forth. That's the mission. And for a lot of it, you know, our focus is on new developers, like tech companies, rethinking the bank, rethinking lending, rethinking how one invests, how one saves. And there's been a lot of really cool companies.

What's interesting now, and especially with COVID, is we're seeing an acceleration of the innovation going beyond pure fintechs. Right? So I think there's two big things that have happened with COVID. Like, one of them is Americans no longer go to their bank branch because it's closed. Right? Or if it's open, it's like you have to wait in line, and you also don't wanna be close to others. So what that has caused is actually even more traditional players in the financial space have to be much more digital and virtual in how they deliver financial services. And so there's really incredible statistics. Like, 60% of Americans use more fintech now than they did in January. Like, for 70% of people in the US, fintech over an app has been a lifeline. And three-quarters of Americans see it as the new normal. Meaning, they might still go to a branch for stuff, but there's a bunch of stuff that they used to go to a branch for that they don't anymore. So COVID is terrible. Right? But just from the lens of fintech, it's just accelerated not just innovation by fintechs, but it's accelerated traditional players also having to adapt their experiences.

And then the second thing that's happened is the PPP, the federal kind of program to help protect people's paychecks. Right? And so the way that was done is basically through loans to businesses. But those loans couldn't happen in person. They also had to happen digitally, and it was a large, a 100+ billion dollar amount of money in loans that had to be issued. And so the way that worked is actually all the traditional banks that had relationships with businesses had to figure out a way to issue these virtually. So it's not just on the consumer behavior side, but also the banks themselves had this one event that forced them to collaborate more with fintechs, figure out how to be digital. And so I think we're gonna come out of this with, I don't know, three, five year acceleration in the rate of fintech penetration in the US, which has been really fascinating.

So for us, the mission now, it's not just, in your garage, he and she engineers doing a new startup. It's also how do you work better with established financial players. How do you look at even non-typical financial players, like car dealerships that wanna issue credit when you're buying a car? Like, how do you think beyond pure finance as the set of players that may wanna build better financial experiences for consumers? So that's it's a pretty exciting mission. It has a lot of as exciting as it is, it has a lot of unknowns. Right? So it's almost too many directions to go into. And so, you know, it's too much choice when your small is scary because you don't have the team to do all the things. So that's kind of where we struggle with today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:38) It can be. Yeah. One of the hardest moments of my life was when I realized that I could do pretty much anything after I used to be not a great person and then decided to start working hard and become a great person and just changed my entire life over the past ten years. And then I was actually faced with this moment of, woah, you know, it was with this podcast where I thought this would take me ten years and maybe I would get to the point where I could make a paycheck or build relationships and lead another company through the podcast or something like that. And when I looked back and we're three years and we're cash flow positive, and I'm like, I had this moment where I was like, oh, no. I didn't pick my next thing. And then I started thinking, oh, wow. Well, I saw how much hard work it takes to do something and I realized I could just chew out, like, block off the next decade and do anything I want. And then that opened up this world of possibilities which sent me spiraling. And then I'm like, oh, man. That's a tough thing. Right? It's like when you win the lottery or something, you kinda go crazy because you don't have the skills to handle it. And so then I had to develop skills and that was it was so great and such a synchronous moment too. When right when I had that problem, I had a platform and a stream of great bright people coming through that could help me through that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) So I talked it out. I talked it through a lot of the different episodes and bounce ideas off people. And I was very excited when I heard that you were coming on the show with Plaid, and partly because the way I got the money, really the bulk of the money to start this, was me selling my interest in a fintech company that I had. And this problem was the big thing that was the hardest part of the project because we did financial analysis across their entire portfolio with withdrawal strategies and tax strategies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) And we basically just made—there's many other players out there in the market, but we did it specifically against this one style of financial modeling. And in the process of that, we had this trouble getting access to these bank accounts and this financial data that we needed, and we ended up building it ourselves. And actually that was one of my first extractions from the monolith was the service for connecting to all these accounts. And then we ended up having to hire a team of people because they always change and half of them had APIs and the others you were scraping. And some of them even had to go download a PDF and then extract from the PDF.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) And it was such a complicated orchestration. I just really understand the type of problems you guys are solving over there. And I've loved how the industry has matured because this was seven or eight years ago. But you guys, how long have you been around? You've been around at least seven years, right?

(Jean Denis at 00:30:27) Well, I've been at Plaid four, and I was at Dropbox before that for about four years. But, by the way, you've just described—when I joined Plaid four years ago, you've literally just described the company. Yeah. Those are the tough problems, right? The n plus one bank that doesn't have APIs or has data that's organized totally different than somebody else. How do you get that? How do you clean it? How do you make it easy for developers to work with?

(Jean Denis at 00:30:55) And I think it's better now than it was, but it feels like it could still be so much better. So, you know, it's interesting. It's not a solved problem. Banks are still moving to digital platforms. They're still figuring out how to write APIs. They're figuring out how to make their data more synchronous. Think about a bank that updates their website once a day. Right? You can use that credit card during the day, but the live data of your spending during the day is just not available anywhere. Right? That's not a great experience. It doesn't matter how good Plaid is there. At the end of the day, you're not getting live data.

(Jean Denis at 00:31:32) And so someone's building a fraud model on top of that data and it's delayed twenty-four hours, well, that's not gonna be the world's best fraud model. Right? That's just the reality of it. So, you know, I think it's much, much better than it was three to four years, and I think we built a lot of good technical foundation. We're partnering with banks to make it better daily, weekly.

(Jean Denis at 00:31:56) But I think we're still a few years away from it being what it needs to be, I think, for consumers to be able to have third-party financial experiences that are as good as what they can get from their core bank or whatnot. That's awful. I didn't realize that—you literally describe the business, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:14) Yeah, I went through it. It was a lot of work, and it was very successful. And my business partner, actually, I helped him grow his business so fast and so efficiently because we basically just automated a job that was the most expensive expense he had, which was coming up with these financial reports and the analysts he would have to hire. And he expanded from one location to five locations in two or three years. And then he said—and I was getting a little frustrated saying, hey, you know, our agreement was I come shadow you for three years, understand how your business works, build this software to automate the hardest thing for you, and then we go take it to market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) And he's like—it was so profitable for him and his business. He didn't want competitors to have it. And so he offered to buy me out, and I accepted the offer and then used the money to start the podcast.

(Jean Denis at 00:33:05) Very cool. Yeah. The founding story of Plaid is kind of similar, actually. William and Zach built the integrations for themselves because they were building an app to give financial advice. And because they were out here in Silicon Valley, they were in this group of other people who were starting fintech companies, some of the ones that are kind of pretty big now.

(Jean Denis at 00:33:30) And everyone wanted to access the data, and so they had this insight. Well, if everyone wants to do this, why don't we build a service around it? But initially, it looked like it was gonna be really small because there just weren't that many fintechs. Right? It's one of those things where you're—our luck, I don't know if that's the right word, but serendipitously, you have the shovels for a thing that will be a huge cave system. Right? And you just don't know that at first. At first, people are just building small little holes, and you're like, oh, I'll make a $100,000 by selling the shovel. And, yeah, it's worked out really well.

(Jean Denis at 00:34:05) Because there was no one doing it. Seven years ago, it was Intuit and maybe Yodlee had some version of this, but Intuit closed their API and then Yodlee, you have to pay them a huge amount of money just to get started. And so it just wasn't accessible to startups or to people who were on a budget. You had to do it like you did. Right? You had to build it in-house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) I haven't heard that name in a long time. Yodlee. Yeah. They—we couldn't use them because it didn't fit in our thing. You know, it was me and my business partner, Robert, and he owned a financial advisory firm that was already in existence. And we needed something. And I like how that was interesting how you said that because it was the same thing for us. This was not the product. This was this necessary thing that we had to do in order to run the calculations that we needed to run at this speed and user experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:53) And then pricing came into it and all these different aspects. And I believe at the very—I can't remember, but I believe at the very end, we ended up using Plaid. I'll have to talk to the other engineer, Kevin. But I think at the very end, we ended up using Plaid for 80% of the accounts. And then the ones that we couldn't get at the time, very specialty ones that were different types of financial products. These type of insurance products, you would buy these insurances and they would do guaranteed payouts over the course of twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:25) But we had to use the PDF extraction technology and the screen scraping because these companies didn't even have APIs at all.

(Jean Denis at 00:35:33) Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) This is great. Yeah. So when you were talking about the PPP stuff, man, did that resonate with me? Because we did our protection thing. And at the time, Wells Fargo, who's our main bank, they weren't accepting the applications. It took everyone so much time to understand and read, and that's just the nature of it. And I understand. But we had a local regional bank that was recommended to us through our VC, and we use them. And so I opened an account there, and we applied, and we got the money. But oh my goodness, it was like stepping back into the eighties with the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) I was like, these banks exist, and they have fifteen, twenty locations. And it's almost unusable the way that these mega banks have advanced the technology so far and you've become so accustomed to them. These local regional banks are—it's like, woah. It's just an entirely different experience.

(Jean Denis at 00:36:33) So we see this a lot. Right? It's like—I don't wake up every morning and necessarily tap myself on the shoulder for the great positive morality of what we do at Plaid. But one thing that I'm quite cognizant of is it's actually hard for smaller banks and mid-sized banks, like regional banks, to compete with national players because technology is becoming such a big part of what you need to be great at as a bank to for your consumers. Right?

(Jean Denis at 00:37:02) And so there are eight-plus thousand financial institutions in the US. Right? And credit unions, by the way, in the US are awesome. Right? They're, from a consumer perspective, from a community perspective, from a profit motive—they're wonderful. The problem with the credit union is they're not gonna be able to hire world-class engineers. Right? A lot of them are small, and they just don't have the budget to do it. So I think for us, we view what we call the long-tail financial institutions as something that we need to serve really well because I think those institutions are very important locally. Right? They support communities. Right? So if Plaid doesn't support a bank in a certain community and there's users of that bank that wanna use Acorns or they wanna use Square Cash or whatnot and they can't, it's kind of our responsibility to make sure that that bank exists. So that's one aspect of it.

(Jean Denis at 00:37:36) The good thing is a lot of the—there are companies that provide banking platforms for the long tail as well, and I think those companies are more and more sophisticated, and I think are actually gonna lead to pretty good competition on the consumer experience around financial services, even for those smaller institutions.

(Jean Denis at 00:38:12) But, you know, it's been interesting. With Black Lives Matter and the movement, one thing that we did internally is ask ourselves—the way, traditionally, we weigh which banks to integrate with is based on expected traffic volume. Right? So there's 8,000 institutions. It takes a significant amount of effort to integrate with them. Right? Look at how many people work with an institution who are trying to use apps and use that as the guiding principle of where you spend engineering and support energy. But in another perspective, you could have it like, well, you know, there's some moral duty to support banks in communities that are underbanked or communities that are totally unbanked. Right? Or to support apps that are aiming to provide better financial services for immigrants. Right? Or create synthetic credit score equivalents for people who move to the US and don't have any credit history.

(Jean Denis at 00:38:55) And so I think that's something we've always asked ourselves, and I think we've been much more conscious about this year because of just—you know, the COVID crisis does not affect everybody in the United States evenly. And as someone—you know, as I said, we take pride in helping to create the future, but you have to ask yourself if the ways in which you create the future advantage or disadvantage certain groups in the country.

(Jean Denis at 00:39:28) So, you know, I think we're much more aware of credit unions, smaller community banks, and—you know, that we've maybe traditionally we're aware of, but now we're like, we have to make the data quality for those institutions as good as it is for Chase or for Wells Fargo because they operate in areas where Chase and Wells Fargo don't. And that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:47) And they're—it's important. I just wanted to send them an email and say, hey. Could you guys invest in your UX? Because it doesn't have to be ugly. Alright. I'm sorry. I'll move on. I'll move on. One of the things that I remember about you guys is how beautiful your interfaces were. The first time I saw it, I remember screenshotting the process and then coming up with some wireframes and mockups to rework ours because the—just at the time the design if you look at it now, that version would probably look old, but at the time, it was so modern.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) And I actually—I noticed I was using Plaid the other day when I did an application online, and I was like, yes. It's like they're keeping up with it. It's still an amazing design. It was amazing years ago when I first met them. But you—when you were just talking just now, you mentioned something. You talked about underbanked people. So I understand not having a bank account. Right? And I understand having a bank account. But what are underbanked people?

(Jean Denis at 00:40:45) Um, well, I mean, one example would be, you've got a bank account, but no one will give you a credit card, and so you only use debit, and so you're not able to build any credit scoring. And so then you need a loan, and you can't get a loan. Right? And just because of the way the credit system works in the United States, right, just about everybody looks at credit score, but you just don't have—what do you do then? Right? So that would be someone that would be underbanked.

(Jean Denis at 00:41:11) There's some really cool companies out there that are doing things. So, for example, in a mortgage space, there's a company called Better, which is kind of in the mortgage lending space. And what they're trying to do is look at different metrics to remove bias from the process of approving someone for a loan. Right? And so I think, you know, the—there's people who might not be able to get a loan or be able to get as good terms on a mortgage we should be able to. Because if you look at the data of how they spend money, even if it's just debit or whatnot, right, they would qualify.

(Jean Denis at 00:41:35) Or you have—so it's one area. There's a bunch of cool apps out there. One, I think that I like is Grain Technologies that basically gives you something that kind of looks like debit, but actually builds a credit score for you with very low rates, right, as a way for someone to build enough credit that they can then use other services. So that's one example.

(Jean Denis at 00:42:11) Another example would just be—I mean, look. There's places in the US where there are fewer banks where local banks don't offer even certain services to people there. There's a good example—small businesses. So, you know, look at—if you're a small business and you need to finance your inventory, right, but you started as a sole proprietorship. You maybe don't have a great credit score. How do you fund buying your next inventory so that you can sell more stuff? Right?

(Jean Denis at 00:42:34) So if you look at Shopify, right, they're starting to look at merchant trajectory in terms of past sales, but also other aspects of that solo entrepreneur or sole proprietor's spending history to decide whether they'll help fund ongoing business. Right? And that's an area before you kind of might have been shit out of luck there. Right? Your local bank might not have been willing to look beyond a few things and might have evaluated you like very different businesses than what someone solo in a disadvantaged community is gonna start.

(Jean Denis at 00:42:58) And then just credit overall is not available evenly in the United States. Right? Even if there's a bank in a community, it might have only a certain amount of lending that it can do, right, because it's a community bank. And so once that's tapped out and used, if you're there and trying to start something and there's no other financial institution covering you, what do you do? So there's just a ton of this. And, by the way, unbanked and underbanked in the US, like, 25% of the population. Right?

(Jean-Denis at 00:43:40) So it's a lot of people, and it's an opportunity, by the way. I think if you're a larger financial institution, it's not like you don't want to serve people because if it's ROI positive, you want to do it. You just might not be capable of doing it, or the system is set up in a way that you don't have the data, or you can't make a lending decision based on a separate set of factors because you're just not equipped to do that. Right? So I think a lot of the fintech innovation is initially small new companies doing it differently. But what I'm really hopeful is that then you see that stuff be mainstream.

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:11) Right? And you don't have to have one of the new companies win. You can have other existing players copy, in a positive way, some of this fintech innovation and make it available to everybody. But that was really long. I'm very long-winded, as you have noticed.

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:24) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:25) Well, luckily, you're on a talk show, so—

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:27) Yeah, yeah, it works. It works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:30) You're like—

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:31) You're very conversational. It's one thing I liked from a few episodes. I like our conversation with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:36) Oh, thank you. Did you check out the Shopify episode?

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:39) I did not. I haven't checked out the Shopify episode. I checked out the PayPal episode—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) Oh, yeah.

(Jean-Denis at 00:44:46) —quite liked it. And then I listened to one with the CTO at GitHub talking about these three timelines of innovation and building a CTO office that's an innovation or Skunk Works unit. I thought those two were interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:05) Yeah. No, his horizon one, two, and three thing, I was like, clip that. That's the—you know, we always look for the one gem in the episode, and we're like, yep, there it is. I hadn't heard that before, and I love the way that he articulated it. It was good. Jason's awesome, man.

(Jean-Denis at 00:45:21) Yeah, it was a great episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:23) So what's really on your mind right now? What are you really excited about at Plaid?

(Jean-Denis at 00:45:29) What am I really excited about? Right now, 2021 planning's on my mind. I've got some spreadsheets with headcount plans and budget and all that kind of stuff, but I don't think that's really good material for this podcast. One thing that I'm thinking about for next year for us specifically is privacy engineering. So this isn't polished. You're just gonna—I'm gonna give you raw stuff, and you can push back and make me feel stupid. That's totally fine. So people build bridges, right? We build bridges. And generally, when I drive over a bridge, I'm pretty sure that it's not gonna fall apart and break. Right? But back in the day, people used to build bridges, and sometimes they fell or they broke or whatnot. But now we build bridges that'll last 50, 100, 200 years, and we know how to maintain them. And the reason is we've learned lessons. Right? We've learned how you build a bridge, the materials that you use, the—you need ways to maintain, all this stuff. It's part of this discipline called civil engineering. Great. Architects, civil engineers, they work together. You can't trust one civil engineering firm, so you always have another firm double-check the work to make sure you're not putting too much load on things. Right? All this stuff. When the materials come in, you inspect them. You might have different providers to make sure you have competition on the quality. All this stuff exists. Right? Great. So we're good at building bridges. Wonderful. Now they're very expensive to build. Right? And they take a long time to build. You have all this permitting and all this stuff that makes it heavy. So my mindset is, in the world of engineering for computers, we're in the third century AD right now. Maybe not even. I don't know. Maybe we're pre-Roman. Right? We kind of understand the things that we have to do, but I don't think we have true discipline around what best practices are around every little bit of area of engineering. So I think for reliability and uptime, there's now a cabal of people who've worked at companies that have really high scale who understand that if you're gonna work on a high-scale system, there's 10,000, 20,000 engineers in the world that have enough expertise that you can build something that runs at five nines or six nines. It exists. Right? One area where I think we're very nascent, and it both scares me and excites me, is around privacy and privacy engineering. Just simple things like data deletion. Right? You get data, you create—you know, you use your data, you use it to build products. Great. What are good data deletion practices? And not just deleting the initial data, but deleting that data in your monitoring system, in your logging system, in your tracing system. What about derived data? What about derived data that you can use to reconstruct the initial data? What about derived data that's truly anonymized that you can't even tie back to the initial data point? Right? There's just a long stream. And I think right now, we build systems that are good at getting insights, but I don't think we have the privacy aspect really well defined, which is, what's our responsibility towards our users, towards data that we have? What about reselling data? Can you resell the original data? Can you resell the anonymized data? Can you not resell any of it? Do you bury things in your terms of service? Are you really clear with your users about what you do with your data? There's this really long range of questions. It's not super answered. It's kind of getting answered in the ad tech space. You know, there's been a lot of retargeting and selling, and people have had kind of weird experiences online when an ad appears somewhere where you don't expect it to. And so now there's some companies in the ad tech space who I think have much better privacy practices. Snapchat actually comes to mind as a company that's very privacy forward around how they think about ads, and that's great. But, again, we don't have best practices. In fintech, for us, it's the same way. Plaid has always said we don't sell data to anybody else. We just don't sell data. Right? We just don't provide it to any third parties. We're a pipe. We're a pipe from A to the app that you use. We feel really strongly about that. We also put restrictions in our developer terms about what the developers who build on Plaid can do with the data. But we're coming to this from really good intent. Right? And obviously, there's regulation that may be passed, and we're talking to a lot of people to try to define what are best privacy practices for fintech. Right? But for me, it's a frontier. So it's something I'm excited about because I think so many companies use us that I think we have a huge opportunity to set a really high bar for what best privacy practices are in fintech. It's also kind of self-serving because we think competitors to Plaid actually have not good privacy services—sorry, policies and kind of might have sold data in the past or maybe selling data now. So I think I feel good about where we are. Right? But I think I'm really excited about the opportunity to kind of define what best-in-class privacy engineering is. And I think if you look at companies that build things 10 years from now, I think it will be clear what you're supposed to do towards consumers. I think there'll be a set of best practices that exist, much like we're seeing around, as I said, distributed systems and building high-reliability systems. So that's something I'm really excited about, but I think it's still wrapping my head around it. Right? Something with my security and privacy team, we're spending a lot of time talking about and trying to understand what it looks like. Because if you look at GDPR, you look at regulation across the world, it's also nascent. And I think the danger always of the regulatory aspect is, what if it brings you to an area which really scuttles innovation? Right? So I think, for us, it's really important. How do you work with the government, with regulators? How do you work with consumer protection groups? How do you do something that leads to great privacy but also still the ability for people to build better experiences and innovate? That's the—it's rant-ish, but I get excited about that. It's weird to say I'm excited about privacy. If you'd asked me four years ago when I left Dropbox, would I be excited about privacy engineering, I would have been like, I don't understand. You know? Just store the data encrypted. We're done. Life is great. But I think I have a much more subtle understanding of that stuff. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:40) Yeah. And you're seeing that it's becoming more important.

(Jean-Denis at 00:51:44) I'm seeing that it's more important. I'm also seeing, you know, we're all seeing how it can be dangerous this year. Right? And so I feel a lot more responsibility towards, at least in the financial space, making sure it's broadly good. Right? Not just good to make money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02) Yeah. Because it's one thing—there's the expectation that I'm being tracked on the internet just because I build this stuff. Right? And understand how the marketing and all these ad tech technologies work. And so that's cool. But talking about something and knowing that the Facebook app is listening to the microphone and seeing ads about—okay, that doesn't—it's nothing special there. Right? But if I started seeing ads based off of bank account purchases that weren't connected, and the only way for them to have known this information would be to be hooked into my bank account purchases, that would be—for me, that's, at least today because it's a frog and boiling water deal. For me today, that would be unacceptable.

(Jean-Denis at 00:52:47) Yeah. I mean, that's way above the line. We're nowhere even close to where the world is. Thank God. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's one one that I've always asked myself, just what can you do to delete all of the data that's out there about you? Say you wanted to. Right? You can ask Google to delete it. But who else had access to it along the way? What are they doing with it? It's the downstream effects that are almost what's more scary than the initial actors. It's, you know, kind of like after it's been handed off once, how many more times is it handed off? So that's why for us, we just don't hand it to anybody because we can't trust anybody except the one app that the user wants to use. But, yeah, it's a complicated world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:33) It is. Because at the same time, all the engineers—or all the engineers I've met, or at least on the surface, and this whole theme of this whole industry has been, since I've been a part of it, since, you know, age eight, has been, let's just build cool stuff to help people. And so that's where most people's heart is there. And so that's how I, you know, deal with the stress of me in these—I'll watch The Social Dilemma, and I'll start to get stressed out. And then I kind of just have to back up and be like, alright, I need some faith that we're all really good humans, and 99% of people I interact with in life are good with good intentions. And so let's just use that as the model of the world and know that it's not gonna be perfect today. Things are gonna get better. And we're definitely—we are making so many advances. We didn't get electricity until a hundred and ten years ago, and look where we're at today. I mean, this is crazy.

(Jean-Denis at 00:54:29) You have to—I think people can all be good, but you can still have unintended consequences that you worry about. Right? So it's like—I mean, when I was at Plaid, it was, you know, fewer than 20 engineers. Security and privacy were a core part of what we did. Right? And if we had some engineers that, yeah, we're moving fast and building things to help people, but they had to run things by security and privacy. Yeah, you had to. You just, you know, because we were from the beginning—for us, it's like, we cannot get this wrong. You just cannot get this wrong. You have to get this right as a company from the beginning. You cannot—one instance of it going bad is the end of the business. Right? And that's a different mindset. That's not the mindset that some companies that I've worked on in the past had, even though some of the data that they had might have been really sensitive. Right? Just because you didn't think about it. I think now people are much more conscious of these things. I just think the best practices are not super well defined. But, yeah, do you think we're still in a moment where—because I feel like we're in a moment that's more negative about Silicon Valley. I think the veil of, like, we're good people trying to make things better, I think hasn't proven to be as true. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:42) So I look at us as a global technology community because that's my perspective, talking to people all over the world. So when I say that, I mean technologists in general. If there was—you look at all the—that person's a technologist. The majority of people I'm running into, they just—we're kind of geeks, and they think it's cool to build stuff that helps other people.

(Jean-Denis at 00:56:05) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:06) But, yes, San Francisco is having a hard time right now in the press, my friend, because some of the companies and the cost and all that stuff. But you know what? It'll all come back around. It'll work itself out. Things will get good again. It's just how it always goes. There's always ebbs and flows. You know? When we were cave people, we used to see the sun going down thinking the world was gonna end until it came back up the next morning. I watched The Croods this weekend with my kids.

(Jean-Denis at 00:56:32) It's true. We have to learn. There are lessons to be learned. You know what I mean? And that's the important part. I think if you open your eyes and you're willing to learn the lessons, then, yeah, the sun will shine again. And, actually, it's, by the way, fascinating that I'm sorry that I use Silicon Valley language because, you know, my whole team is splintering, and people are moving to all sorts of places in the United States and beyond. But I think a really exciting thing about this year is I think the next generation of companies are much more global and international because of what's happening than Silicon Valley. Right? And Silicon Valley is an echo chamber. Lots of positive things, lots of, you know, funding and really people pushing their ideas to their limit, but I'm excited to see people who haven't been here show everybody that you can build better companies elsewhere. You know, we talked about Shopify a little bit before, but perfect example of an amazing business that just doesn't have much to do with this little corner of the world, thankfully.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:28) Yeah. And you've been all over the world. That was actually one of my first notes, is to talk about all of the different places you've lived, and it was very exciting. I know we're coming up here. It's already three after two here, and so I want to be respectful of your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:41) But you are a person I very much enjoy talking to, and you have an open invitation to come back on the show. You know, maybe next year you can come back on. We can catch up and talk more about leadership, what we're learning in life and stuff, because I really enjoy talking with you.

(Jean Denis at 00:57:54) Yeah, Joel, anytime. Yeah, it was a really good chat.

(Jean Denis at 00:57:59) Why don't we—let's do it. Twelve months from now, the world will still be here, and we'll have more interesting things to discuss. Thanks a lot for the time, and let's 100% do it again. So really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:08) Awesome. Thank you so much, my friend. Have a great day.

(Jean Denis at 00:58:10) Bye, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:13) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.