Ben Liebald - CTO at Branch

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ben, the CTO at Branch, and we discuss how Branch is delivering financial services to the mobile generation in emerging markets, the story behind the time that Ben won a Technology Emmy, and overcoming the challenges of booting up a distributed engineering team when the world is shut down. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Yeah, we've had a string of financial products and stuff like that on the show recently, and I saw Branch is a financial company, but you don't operate the way Plaid operates. You're in a different market, right?

(Ben at 00:00:51) That's right. Yeah, Branch International, as the name implies, is focused on international markets, particularly emerging markets. And yeah, has been around for about five years. It was actually started by some folks coming out of Kiva, kiva.org. I don't know if you're familiar with that nonprofit. I would say it was the nonprofit that probably put microfinance on the map or made it something people in the U.S. were familiar with. And Matt Flannery was one of the founders of Kiva and led Kiva for 10 years. He started Branch five years ago with a similar idea and similar focus, except it's not a nonprofit. It's a for-profit, but really focused on delivering world-class financial services to what we call the mobile generation, essentially focusing on emerging markets and focusing on people that, up until now, up until recently, didn't have access to formal financial services, which is a large group of people. You might be surprised. I think I was looking it up. There's still around 1.5 billion adults in the world, around 30% of the global adult population, that still are unbanked, meaning they don't have an actual bank account or a mobile money account with anyone. And then there's an even larger proportion of people that are underbanked, meaning they may have a bank account or something along those lines, but they don't get access to financial services. They don't have access to credit. They don't have access to savings. And so, you know, that's the set of people that Branch is—that's the problem that Branch is looking to address and that we've been working on for the last five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) So are these unbanked people—is this underdeveloped countries?

(Ben at 00:02:40) Yeah, a lot of it is in emerging markets. There's—obviously, actually surprisingly enough—there's a large percentage of people in the U.S. who you could consider underbanked by one definition or another. It's obviously a bit of a fuzzy term. But I think even in the U.S., 22% of adults either don't have a credit score or have a very thin credit file, meaning there's not a lot of information about them in that sense. And as a result of that, they'll have trouble getting access to credit. But of course, a large fraction of people that are underbanked or unbanked are in emerging markets. India, I think it's probably around 300 to 400 million people that don't have a credit score, that may not have a bank account, et cetera, et cetera. And then lots of other markets in Asia and Africa, in South America, et cetera.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) And so how did you get into the financial market space?

(Ben at 00:03:40) Yeah, for me, this is actually my first foray into this. I don't have a long history of being in financial services or fintech. And I've been with Branch for two years, but I've known the founders basically since they started the company back in late 2014, early 2015. Got introduced to them back then and even considered joining Branch as a co-founder at the time. This is sort of a separate story, but I ultimately decided to do my own startup instead. But then, you know, three years later, reconnected with them. And they were looking for someone to help run the engineering team. And, you know, that's when we reconnected. And I had been excited about what they're doing and really interested in this space ever since meeting them first, and, you know, joined them to help them scale the engineering team and help them scale the business too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:37) What was the company that you founded?

(Ben at 00:04:40) Yeah, the company I founded was called Mensch Labs. And the product we launched was called Rep. And this was something I started with—previously I'd been at Google and YouTube for a long time. And I teamed up with another ex-Googler, also conveniently called Ben. So for a little while, the code name for our yet-to-be-named startup was Ben Squared. But Rep was intended to be a customer service, customer communications platform focused on messaging. So this was around 2015, and there was a lot of hype around messaging and using that as a communication channel for all sorts of things, also chatbots and automation around that. And we were interested in figuring out how can we offer a platform that allows businesses to communicate with customers through that channel, both for customer service, but also for marketing and customer engagement, as well as transactional messaging. And how do you package all of that up? How do you give the business a 360 view of the customer to help them understand what they might want to do next and, you know, offer really excellent customer service? And so we ended up building that platform, worked with a number of ecommerce businesses—Timbuk2, and Gemvara, and then La Fleur. These are all kind of higher-end ecommerce businesses. And ultimately, you know, got to the point where we got paying customers and got some traction, but not enough to justify continuing to do it. And so then, you know, we were at this point where we're like, should we raise another round of funding? Do we really have confidence that we can scale this? And we decided, you know, it's probably better to try and do something else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Yeah. You can go in, you can get some paying customers and have it work, right? Have it up, but then there not be a large growth potential. It could just be a really slow process to acquire. You could have eight-month sales cycles. Customers that—what they're willing to pay for your solution is not large enough to where you have a small number of really large customers. And so it's just sometimes the businesses just aren't—you know, and sometimes they would even make for great lifestyle businesses where you could just make a couple $100K a year and just kind of let it go. But I want big. I want to be really valuable and useful. I want to be Elon Musk valuable, right?

(Ben at 00:07:05) Yeah. I mean, that's—you described it well. We found ourselves essentially in that situation. You know, we had revenue, but it wasn't growing fast enough, and we wondered, you know, is this going to be something that's going to have rocket ship potential or up-and-to-the-right type potential? And I think we ultimately concluded, yeah, the sales cycle is too slow, and the exact proposition or customer value proposition isn't quite there. You know, is it differentiated enough compared to other customer service tools? How does it play with other marketing solutions that a lot of businesses already have and invest heavily in? So, yeah, you're exactly right. I think one thing that's interesting about startups is, despite all the Lean Startup and customer development and all the good work that's been done there and all the writing around it, I still—it was eye-opening to me how difficult it can be to sort of truly assess, is there something here or not? Because you get a lot of positive signals. People are excited about what you're building. They think that sounds great. A bunch of people tell you they'll buy. You get early customers, but then, you know, it takes a while to get to that point. And at some point it may fizzle out, and it's not clear to me that we could have seen that coming much earlier other than by building it and going to the market and doing the things we were doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) But you learn so much, and you got that feeling because you had been at larger companies before, right? You get all the benefits and the great pay, and then you go do your own thing and you're like, oh, this is so difficult.

(Ben at 00:08:32) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, this is one of the reasons I wanted to do this. As I mentioned, I was at Google for a long time. This is essentially where I started my career, and I learned a lot there, had a great time. I think I grew tremendously as an engineer and as a technologist, but I was pretty shielded from the business side of things. You know, I mean, I interacted with product managers and obviously lots of other engineers, but very little with marketing, very little with biz dev, very little with anyone who sort of thought about the—how does the business actually generate revenue? And I wanted more exposure to that, which was one of the key reasons for me to leave and do my own thing and start from the very, very beginning of, you know, ideation and then trying to find product-market fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:16) Yeah. I saw that you won a Technology Emmy. Now I didn't even know those things existed. What is that?

(Ben at 00:09:23) I didn't know either until I won it. Yeah. So the Emmys are, you know, obviously TV awards, and they're given out in different categories. I think there's the Primetime Emmys, the Daytime Emmys, Sports Emmys. And there's also a separate category called the Technology Emmys. I think they're given out by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. And so they basically hand out awards to a bunch of innovations that happen in TV production, all the way from the Steadicam, which I think was getting an award the same year that we were getting one, to cue cards that were invented sometime in the '70s. So there's a wide range of things that are eligible for Emmy Awards. And we won one, I think, in 2014 for the recommendation system that I helped build at YouTube along with a bunch of other big Internet companies that had also moved the space forward—Netflix, I think TiVo. I don't recall who else. But so, because I was running the YouTube recommendation system and I had essentially architected the system from the ground up, I got to go and actually both make our case in the meetings where these things were decided among a bunch of people that are in this academy. And then also there was an award ceremony in Vegas, I think at the Bellagio. I don't remember where. I got to give a little awkward acceptance speech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:48) Do you have a little trophy thing on your mantle?

(Ben at 00:10:52) I do. Yeah. We got some pictures of us holding the Emmy. In fact, you know, my boss at the time then organized a whole photo shoot where the entire team at YouTube got to go and hold up the Emmy and pose with it, like award ceremony style. So that was a lot of fun. Yeah. Very fun memories of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) That's pretty cool. Now that was five-plus years ago though, right? That was a while ago.

(Ben at 00:11:18) Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) Yeah. So now that recommendations are a national, like political-style topic going, are people hating on you for this? Or do you just try to be like, shh?

(Ben at 00:11:29) Yeah. I mean, I've not been involved in it since 2015. So, obviously, you know, I'm not necessarily in those conversations. I know there was a documentary a while ago about some of this. No one reached out to me, so I didn't have much to say about it. I would say that the topic of filter bubble and how you can make sure that you expose people to a wide variety of viewpoints and not just the things that they cared about or that was narrowly focused on their interests—that was something that we were thinking about and talking about even back then. But I think, you know, the team at YouTube and at some of the other bigger companies that have similar systems in place, I think they've been doing a lot more work and thinking around how to balance that since I was involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:22) Oh, it's changed so much. Things change so fast. This was five years ago. That's like 50 years ago in tech. The way that the recommendation engines are working today are probably vastly different than what you were building.

(Ben at 00:12:33) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, it changed a lot throughout the course of me being involved. Just to give you a sense, I think when I started working on this, there was, I would say, a prototype system in place. This was in 2010. And literally, we stored fragments of a user's watch history in their cookie and then, you know, computed recommendations on the fly using some cache that happened to be sitting around for some other purpose. And so it was something that someone had built in the course of a hackathon or over, you know, a few weeks. And so then, you know, we really re-architected the system, built it from the ground up for scalability, incorporated a lot more complicated and sophisticated algorithms, layered on machine learning in various places, et cetera, et cetera. So it evolved a lot even during the time that I was there. But then since then, it's—I'm sure it's changed tremendously even more so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) Yeah. And this is definitely not my area of expertise, but, you know, we're all users of these types of products. And when I think about these conversations, my thoughts have evolved on it. At first I was like, oh yeah, you should definitely show people two different types of content so that they understand. And then I was like, you know what, it's really—and now I'm kind of in this field of, we should really focus on raising quality people in the homes and in the families. We should make sure that we resource people to have really good quality families so we're building a strong next generation of people. And then on the technology side, we should give people control, right? And for me, the way I would set up my YouTube or whatever system you want, maybe even a Facebook feed, is I would want the ability to create different narrow feeds and cycle between them. Like, I'd be happier with my guitar feed or my piano feed that is just really, really good at recommending exactly something I want in that niche. And then I can just switch between the context, and then it's just up to us as humans to understand that we need a balanced feed, but the tools themselves just can be really narrow and good at doing those things.

(Ben at 00:14:46) Yeah. And I think we always tried to accommodate different modalities of discovery. It wasn't just all about here's what we recommend, and, you know, that's the only thing you ever get to watch. There was always—and there's obviously search, but there's also lots of browsing capabilities. We built topic pages, various ways of slicing and dicing the recommendations into different categories like you mentioned. So there's a lot of thought put into that. I think one challenge with systems like this and the people working on them is that there's sort of a—I don't know what the right word is, but a little bit of a friction between—we say we would like to have all this control, but when you look at the data of how most people use it, they actually default to the defaults, right? And the first thing you put in front of them is most likely what they're going to click. And so, you know, adding more buttons, adding more sliders, adding more ways to slice and dice things ends up getting taken up by a really small proportion of your user base. And then you have to sort of justify, you know, is it worth the additional complexity? Is it worth the additional work to put that in? So I think this is always a really delicate balancing act.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) Yeah. And I can always get my—what I really love is, like, they have different profiles now. So even when I'm watching Disney with my kids, like, there's different Netflix profiles. Like, you can go into different stuff. And I really, really enjoy that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) I wish that would extend further because we have Amazon Fire Stick TV or whatever for the Mhmm. For our living room. And the giant images that scroll to promote whatever they want to promote is not necessarily kid-friendly because we're not, like, in a section of the kid app or, like, in a specific—and I'm just like, how have they not gotten enough complaints to solve this yet? There's, like, a picture of somebody being killed, and, like, my three-year-old sitting on the couch, like, looking at it. And then it cycles to, like, a Disney princess, and I'm like, oh, this is not, like, something I want my kids experiencing, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:44) Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? I'm assuming you can handle that for me. You can reach out to Bezos.

(Ben at 00:16:51) Not on the—am not on the Amazon Fire Stick. I'm sorry. Alright. Different company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) I tried. I tried. No. I'm glad we got to connect though because, you know, I was talking with David, the CTO over at Andela, and he's like, "This guy's the guy. He's really cool. You would love to meet him. He's responsible for Fire Stick development on the weekends."

(Ben at 00:17:11) You got that wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:13) But, uh, so Andela, I had heard about them way long ago from, I think, Matish or Mitesh—I always get his name wrong—the CTO at the Zebra. And he was talking about how he used them with great success. And then, uh, we ended up talking with him, and I got to meet him, and he told me about his trips to Africa. And then I said, "Hey, who else should I be talking to?" And he mentioned you, and you guys were a customer of Andela's.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) And I was just curious, what was your experience like?

(Ben at 00:17:38) Yeah. I mean, uh, this is a good topic. As I mentioned, you know, Branch is an international company. It's got "international" in the name. And even though it was founded in the US by people based in San Francisco—that's where I am based—the customer base was always going to be in other markets, not in the US.

(Ben at 00:17:56) And so it started out in Kenya, offering essentially a mobile app there that, you know, you could download on the Play Store, uh, and then apply for a loan, a microloan. You know, loans as small as the equivalent of $5 going up to maybe $100 or $200 at most, and then just get that dispersed into your mobile wallet. So there was a lot of need for that kind of product. Over time, it grew, and, um, the company expanded into additional markets. First, Tanzania, then Nigeria, later outside of Africa, also into Mexico and India.

(Ben at 00:18:31) And so with every single expansion, we ended up opening another office in those markets for operations, customer service, loan review, some finance and accounting. Um, but the engineering team had actually always—the engineering and product team had always remained in San Francisco, um, just because, you know, that's where the founders were based. That's where the initial starting team was based. It was easier to hire engineers here. It was good to be, like, in a small setting, you know, sit around one table literally.

(Ben at 00:19:00) Um, and so that's how it had evolved. But we got to a point where we realized, you know, we really need to diversify and distribute our product and engineering teams more because, you know, we want to have people in the markets that we're in help us build the product and help us build the technology. Why? Because they understand the customer better. They live, you know, in the same country, in the same—they have the same day-to-day experiences.

(Ben at 00:19:27) It's very hard for me to actually use our app because I don't have a Nigerian phone number or a Nigerian bank account, and so I can't go through our onboarding flow and test it out. I think it's really important for product and engineering teams to, like, you know, work really closely on the product they work on and have sort of an opinion as to what could be better and build that intuitive understanding as opposed to just, you know, being told by others. Um, obviously, that's important too. But if you're not using the product on a day-to-day basis, it's really difficult to build customer empathy. So we wanted to do that.

(Ben at 00:20:01) That was the sort of starting point. And, actually, in addition to customer empathy, one other thing I should mention is just building anything in fintech typically involves integrating with a lot of—um, so in our case, you know, we have to move money around. So we had to, in Kenya, integrate with M-Pesa. It's the mobile money wallet that, uh, is really prevalent there. Um, similar integrations in other markets.

(Ben at 00:20:25) We have to integrate with KYC portals. KYC is "know your customer," or, you know, identity verification. Uh, in some instances, we have to report certain things to the government in terms of loan repayments or credit bureaus. And so all of that, um, is pretty challenging in general, but it's even more challenging when you're doing it, you know, nine to 12 time zones away and with people that are typically not accustomed to working with someone this far away, that they want to meet in person, etcetera, etcetera.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:53) So why did you choose Andela instead of building the teams out yourself?

(Ben at 00:20:58) Yeah. Good question. So, um, we just felt like this was a—like, initially, the thinking was this is a good way for us to, like, dip our toes into the water. You know? Like, we operate in Nigeria, but I'd never hired a single engineer in Nigeria or Kenya for that matter. I had no idea what the talent market looked like. I had no idea, you know, what recruiting would look like, how difficult it would be. And so we figured this is a good way for us to try this out. We get to hire, you know, one to two, three, four engineers and, um, see what that's like.

(Ben at 00:21:29) How can we work together as a more distributed team? And, um, yeah, just how all of that's working out. And so that's how we started out. That was, I think, middle of last year. Um, we had some folks come on in May 2019.

(Ben at 00:21:43) The first two developers joined us at that point, um, both back-end developers. And, um, yeah, it's worked out really well. And we've basically grown the team to, I think, about seven engineers through Andela at this point, um, ranging in sort of specializations and skill sets from back-end to Android to, um, to DevOps as well. Most of them are actually located in markets we're at. So four in Nigeria, two in Kenya, and we have one, uh, DevOps developer in Egypt as well, which is not a market we operate in.

(Ben at 00:22:14) But, um, you know, for infrastructure in some sense, it's, you know, it's less important where you're based. And, yeah, I would say Andela has just generally worked out really well for us. The quality of the engineers has been great, um, not just in terms of, you know, smarts and technical competence. But I think one thing Andela has done really well is essentially the model they started with was that they would identify, um, just, you know, talented people—talented people with an engineering background or maybe even with less of a formal, uh, computer science or engineering education—and then train them to, um, train them to be excellent software developers, train them on, like, modern software development methodologies, working with remote teams, working with international companies. And so I think we've really benefited from that.

(Ben at 00:23:02) I think everyone on the team, they're strong communicators. Um, they're very accountable for their work, and, uh, they're just generally a lot of fun to work with. And so that's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) So good choice then.

(Ben at 00:23:16) Yeah. For sure. And, you know, we're continuing to work with Andela. Like, we've evolved our distributed team strategy to, um, also hire in-house. So Andela was essentially the first step for us.

(Ben at 00:23:28) And then as we gain more confidence that, "Hey, this is something that is working well for us. You know, we really benefit from having engineers and, um, and, uh, you know, product developers in local markets," we decided, okay, let's do some of that in-house as well.

(Ben at 00:23:43) And so beginning of 2020, we started building out a team in India, which is another important growth market for us that we had launched in the year before and, um, essentially started looking for a lead, someone who could help us build the team. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Can you walk me through real quick? Because I—you—I haven't—I always, like, research people, and I was like, this guy's an expert. He knows how to build teams in different countries. Like, it was great when you did it in Africa and you had Andela because you can just plug them right in. But when you go into India and it's, like, COVID, like, how do you build a team in another country when the world is, like, shut down?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) How do you do that?

(Ben at 00:24:20) Yeah. Yeah. That was a—that was an interesting experience. So we, you know, we got started on this beginning of the year. And then as we were, like, hitting our stride and, you know, like, finding good candidates and we were like, we had a bunch of folks, um, based in San Francisco ready to travel to India, and this was, like, around mid-March.

(Ben at 00:24:39) And then, you know, COVID essentially became the all-encompassing topic that everyone was talking about. We decided to cancel our trip. Two days later, the Indian government suspended our visa. So even if we had not canceled, we wouldn't have been able to get in. And we ended up doing the entire interview process both for this lead role as well as for all the subsequent, um, software engineering roles, uh, entirely through Zoom.

(Ben at 00:25:04) This is why I'm on Zoom eight hours a day. And, yeah, initially, I remember thinking this is going to be really challenging. You know, we'd never done this before. Can I imagine hiring someone for an important role that I've never met in person? But it turned out to actually work surprisingly well.

(Ben at 00:25:22) And I don't know if it's just because we got lucky or because we had a solid process that, you know, was easily adaptable to Zoom and to doing everything remotely. But both the interview experience as well as the onboarding, um, for everyone on the team, I think, has worked out really well for us. And so I'm generally very, very happy with how that's worked out. Um, one key challenge, of course, is time zone differences. I mean, difference between San Francisco and India is between 12-and-a-half to 13-and-a-half hours depending on whether we're in daylight saving time or not.

(Ben at 00:25:56) Uh, and so finding time to actually meet in person or at the same time is at a premium. So what that means is you need to shift more and more of your communication and of your processes to be done asynchronously. Right? Have more written communication, get better at that, um, maybe record more things and make them available for others to look at later. And so we lean heavily on that during our onboarding.

(Ben at 00:26:20) Um, a lot of our onboarding sessions got recorded. In fact, a lot of our interviews, um, got recorded and others had a chance to review them later. And, um, you know, then obviously written communication and written documentation is also something that we really emphasized and stressed even more so since bringing on that team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) So walk me through it. Like, you're sort of, like, coaching me. If you want to open an office in another country, first, you have to have, like, an idea of why you need it, like, a mission for them, then you find the first developer, then you have—what, that first developer start, like, or, you know, that first technology leader start hiring out locally? Like, what is the flow?

(Ben at 00:27:00) Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, I don't think there's necessarily just one model that can work. Um, I think what matters is that you're conscious and deliberate about your approach. So, you know, some people, I think, um, decide, you know, they don't actually want to just build, um, an office in one country, but instead, they just want to open up, uh, their hiring pipeline for remote opportunities maybe all across the US or maybe all across a certain set of time zones that they're comfortable with.

(Ben at 00:27:27) And then they go about it this way, and they just hire individuals as, you know, as they open roles and come across qualified candidates. I think that's a model that can work. That's not the model we opted for. We explicitly wanted to hire in the markets that we're operating in for all the reasons I mentioned. And so when we looked around how to do this, we had a few decisions to make.

(Ben at 00:27:49) One was, you know, how do you sequence it? As you mentioned, we decided, let's bring in a lead first and then have them be responsible for building the team around them. That was, I would say, overwhelming advice we got from a number of folks, and that has worked out well for us. And it was not easy because it meant that while you're still doing this, and this can be a lengthy process because you're trying to hire for an important role, you have to hold back on hiring software engineers and, um, and other people that you maybe already have a need for and that you feel like you could make productive. Um, but we decided to sequence it this way, and I'm happy with, you know, how that's worked out for us.

(Ben at 00:28:28) Another important consideration for us in India was, like, what city to focus on. And these discussions happened before COVID where, you know, everyone was a little bit more, I think, still attached to, like, building things in a certain location and having an office and so on and so forth. And so we ultimately settled on Bangalore even though we already had an existing operations-focused office in Mumbai. Um, and the reason was just that I think Bangalore, as I was told, just has the largest talent pool, um, when it comes to engineering and when it comes to technologists in India. And, um, also has probably the strongest startup ecosystem, which is something we were specifically looking for. You know, we wanted to hire people that have worked at some of the fastest-growing startups in India, smaller startup companies, product-focused companies, as opposed to a lot of the—there's a lot of, you know, large technology outsourcers and, uh, contractors, and we were, I think, generally more interested in people that had product experience.

(Ben at 00:29:29) So that led us to choose Bangalore. And, yeah, then we, um, you know, we structured an interview process for a lead. Um, I think it took us end-to-end somewhere around four months to actually hire someone, which is—it was a long time, especially in startup land. But I think it worked out well in that, um, Anshul, the person we brought on, uh, you know, he's been—he's been great, and he's been a force multiplier for us in India. And he's, you know, built a really strong team around him since he joined. So we're currently at about 12 people in India, have further growth plans for next year.

(Ben at 00:30:02) And, um, yeah, I would say that's worked out well for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) What's the thing that you're, like, really excited about right now at Branch?

(Ben at 00:30:11) Yeah. I mean, a few different things. I think on the product side, we started with lending, um, built this microloans product, but we've really been focused over the last year on diversifying our product portfolio. The company's mission is to offer financial services to the mobile generation, not lending per se. Um, and even though lending is going to be a key component of what we offer, credit services are going to be a key component of what we offer.

(Ben at 00:30:37) Um, we're really interested in offering additional services. So in Nigeria specifically, we just launched a wallet product, um, that allows people to, um, transfer money to their friends. You can think of this as sort of similar to Venmo, similar to some other wallets that exist. But in Nigeria, there's just a huge need for these kinds of products. Bank transfers are, um, slow, unreliable, and costly.

(Ben at 00:31:01) And so, you know, we see a huge potential for that. I think in India, we're going to continue to really grow the lending business and the credit business, and I'm excited about that. And then more on, uh, like, engineering side, we're continuing to grow the team internationally. So we're going through a similar process as I was describing for India. We're doing something very similar for Nigeria right now.

(Ben at 00:31:23) Uh, I'm in the middle of interviewing lots of candidates for a lead role, and then we're hoping to, uh, build an even bigger team there next year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) Have you ever lived in another country full time?

(Ben at 00:31:33) Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm not originally from the US. You may have picked up on my funny accent. I grew up in Germany, lived there for the first 20 years of my life. And then, actually 23 years, I guess. I went to college in Northern Germany at a small place called International University Bremen.

(Ben at 00:31:53) And even though it was in Germany, it kind of felt like its own international bubble. Only 20% of the students were German, and everybody else was from all over the world, including some of the countries we work in now, such as India, you know, various countries in Africa. And I still have lifelong friends from that time. So that was a very formative international experience for me even though it was in Germany. Later on, I moved to the US for grad school. I was in Illinois for two years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Did more computer science and machine learning, and then actually lived in Switzerland for three years after that, working for Google. I've visited some of the countries that we operate in. I was in Kenya for a few weeks back in 2018 and also in India a few times. The last time was actually just for two days.

(Ben at 00:32:47) That was a bit of a funny story. We were going through some final stages of a security audit before launching in India. And we had worked with the auditors that were based in India all throughout, you know, the last quarter of 2018. But then for the final audit, they actually needed me to be there in person. And so I flew over to India. It's like an 18-hour flight with multiple layovers from San Francisco. We had an hour and a half long meeting, and then I was free to go. So it was just a quick two-day trip, but it was worth it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) That's crazy when the travel's longer than the meeting.

(Ben at 00:33:28) Yeah. Yeah. That was, it was funny. I, after the meeting, I just kind of looked at the country manager there and was like, "That was it? Okay. That's what I came here for." And yeah, but all's well that ends well, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) I'm a pretty active person. The international flights are really tough for me. I like to wake up and go running and, you know, I like to be really active. I saw that you do some running and you play some chess and you cook. Those are your personal hobbies?

(Ben at 00:33:56) I used to be big into running. I've done probably like 20-plus marathons. I used to be pretty fast too, but I've slowed down recently. Last few years, I have three kids. That's keeping me pretty busy. The youngest one was just born this year. The oldest one is about seven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) Congratulations.

(Ben at 00:34:17) Thank you. Yeah. Three boys. So, you know, they're keeping me on my toes in other ways. But, yeah, I still like to go running. San Francisco is obviously great for running if you like hills, but my volume has definitely decreased. This year, I've been having some knee problems too, so I need to get over that. But, yeah, I love to play chess. That's another hobby of mine. I think that one's been surging or booming throughout the pandemic with really renewed interest. So I've been seeing that with joy, I guess. And, you know, other than that, I do continue to stay active. I play a lot of tennis. That's one of the few things you can do during COVID times. The public courts in San Francisco are great, and they mostly kept them open. And so I try and do that when I find the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) Yeah. I've never run marathons. I just wake up every morning and run like one to three miles. That's my jog. And just to get my heart rate up and to get my, you know, to wake up. Otherwise, if I don't do the run, I'm just, I drag in the morning. So I wake up, get out of bed, hit the sidewalk within like five minutes of waking up, and then go on my run and then come back and start life. But, yeah, I've talked to some people, and this one guy, the CTO of Calendly, you know, like the calendaring company—

(Ben at 00:35:38) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) He's like, "Oh, yeah, we run." And I was like, "Oh, this is cool." He's like, "Yeah, we should run some time." And I'm like, "Oh, that's great." He's like, "Yeah, I run like 20 miles as a warm-up practice, and then I run these like 100-mile marathons." And I was like, "What is going on? I cannot keep up with that." It's like, you would hate me if we went running together.

(Ben at 00:35:57) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I find myself more in your camp at this point. In fact, if I could get back to doing a three-mile run every other day in the morning, I'd be happy. But it used to be longer stuff. I mean, marathon was where it usually tapped out, but I think I've done one 50K trail run. And then I used to, at Google, there was a running team that would do these relay runs. So I don't know if you've heard of Hood to Coast and the Ragnar relays. It's essentially 12 people that get together and run a 200-mile race, and you kind of drive along the race course with a van. And so, you know, every runner has three segments to complete that range anywhere from three to eight miles. But in between, you sit in the cramped van, and then six hours later, you go out and run again. So it's a very different experience. By the time the third one rolls around, you haven't slept for 20 hours, and you're really sore. So, but those were always a lot of fun. I have some fun memories of those relays. That's kind of the longest one I've done, I'd say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Oh, man. So, are you a fan of Elon Musk and what he's doing with all of his companies?

(Ben at 00:37:12) I mean, I think it's impressive all the different things he's accomplished with, you know, with SpaceX, with Tesla, previously with PayPal. So in that sense, a lot of admiration. As far as personal style is concerned, I think I've, I put myself kind of in a different hour. I would say I have a different personal style. Less blustery, less—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) Less billionaire-ish?

(Ben at 00:37:37) That too. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) Yeah. Less like Twitter billionaire.

(Ben at 00:37:41) Yeah. Yeah. But it was interesting to see him saying he's moving to, did he say he's moving to Texas?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) Oh, yeah.

(Ben at 00:37:47) Yeah, he's moving to Texas. One of the recent announcements. Yeah. So, I mean, that's been a bit of a theme lately in the Bay Area, you know, people leaving and that becoming a larger theme. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next two years, both, you know, with the tech ecosystem evolving and maybe the center of gravity changing or not. We'll see how it plays out. I, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, and I'm not necessarily the greatest when it comes to predicting the future. But I wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco and Silicon Valley continue to, you know, play a pretty big role when it comes to technology—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:32) Oh, of course they will always play it.

(Ben at 00:38:33) Over the coming decades. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:35) Yeah. And, I mean, look, I'm not attached to a location or a building. I'm attached to the mission of us as technologists. We're actively waking up every day to make the world better and to help people's lives and improve it and push things forward and help. I've never met nefarious technologist people that are like, oh, like, you know, Pinky and the Brain, like they're like a children's character, like they're doing it for evil or something. You know, most of the people, they just are doing it to be useful and to help out. And I think it's great that now, you know, all different parts of the world are doing it. And I'm super pumped. But I was curious, I wanted to play a fun game with you. We just made it up. We really don't play games here on the podcast. But it's simple. You could just answer like yes or no. And I'm going to go through a list of Elon Musk products. You can tell me if you would use them personally. Okay?

(Ben at 00:39:31) They're all real products?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:33) These are all real Elon Musk products. Yeah. So the Tesla cars, would you ride in one or would you use one?

(Ben at 00:39:38) Yeah, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:39) Yeah. Alright.

(Ben at 00:39:39) I don't own one, but I have ridden in some and I would consider them. I do most of my getting around on an electric bike at this point. I bought an electric cargo bike a year ago, and that's been a great way for us to get around in San Francisco. But we do have a car. I think if we were to buy a new one, I'd seriously consider a Tesla.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) So with the electric bike, you pedal, it charges the battery, and sometimes you can use the electric motor?

(Ben at 00:40:05) The battery needs to be charged through a plug, but the battery kicks in, you know, when you have to go uphill, which, you know, is frequently the case in San Francisco. And it helps when you have, you know, one or two little kids on the back. So I can actually take my seven-year-old and my three-year-old and take them to school or take them to daycare and go shopping. So it's been great for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) That's great. I have two little ones under the age of three, or under the age of four, I guess, now. And, yeah, I couldn't imagine riding with them on a bike uphill in San Francisco.

(Ben at 00:40:38) Yeah. Yeah. You need a motor. I mean, I'm in pretty good shape, but I wouldn't want to do it on a non-motorized bike.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) Alright. Rockets. Would you ride in one of his rockets?

(Ben at 00:40:48) I would love to. I mean, I guess if I had the chance to, I don't know, fly to space or have a sort of weightless experience, that sounds really fascinating. My seven-year-old is really into everything related to space, and so that, you know, has given me a renewed interest in that. I think all of that is just really fascinating. What I actually find more fascinating almost, though, is how they managed to do it 50 years ago with the technology they had at the time and, you know, managed to fly a bunch of folks to the moon and bring them back safely. I think that's still just absolutely mind-blowing to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) Me too. Whenever I see that NASA picture of the programming code all printed out on stacks of paper—

(Ben at 00:41:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) And the processing power that was used in order to make that mission happen. I mean, that, it, to me, it's like if I saw an old rusty car, I'd be like, I'm not getting in that.

(Ben at 00:41:42) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's less than what's in your cell phone today. Right? And that's all they needed to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:49) Do you know about the zero-G flights that you can buy and go take?

(Ben at 00:41:53) I heard of that. I mean, I haven't seriously looked into this. I always assume this is out of my price range. I don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:01) I don't think so. I think they start at like $2,000 or something. I mean, it's not cheap by any means, but it's not like—

(Ben at 00:42:09) Okay. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) It's not like a $100,000 ticket. I talked to some people. I don't know if they were astronauts or not, but they definitely worked with astronauts. I'm a big space geek. I'm just like a fan. I don't know a lot of the details, but I had a bunch of different space companies on recently and different, you know, really bright people in that arena. And they were telling me, one of them was like, "Yeah, my buddy owns the zero-G company." And I was like, "That's a thing that's open to the public? You can go do it?" And so I researched, and then you can go, you can do the zero-G flights. They have them in different locations in the US. They have flights where you can actually get into MiGs or different, like, F-16s, different types of fighter pilot jets. And they'll take you up for 90 minutes. And I was like, "This is so cool. We have to find a way to go get them and do something with the podcast with them and help them promote it so I can get to take one of these zero-G flights."

(Ben at 00:43:06) Do a podcast from the MiG? A live broadcast?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) Yes. Hey, and if you know anyone with a Starlink, right now we're working on, we want to be the first episode recorded over Starlink, like the first podcast recorded over a Starlink connection. So we're trying to get our hands on one of those.

(Ben at 00:43:24) I, yeah, I'm not sure I can help with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:27) It's alright. I'm putting it out there. We talked to one guy and he's like, he's in the circle of friends with Elon Musk. And so he's like, "Yeah, I know like four or five people that have them already early." And so we're working that angle, and if that doesn't work out, we're just going to keep bringing it up to people and see if we can do it. I'm just a geek. That's cool for me. My wife's like, "What do you want for your birthday?" I was like, "I don't know. Let's record an episode over Starlink." She's like, "I can't do that, Joel."

(Ben at 00:43:53) Yeah. It's not something I can easily make happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:57) Alright. What about Hyperloop? Would you ride in the giant Hyperloop?

(Ben at 00:44:01) I guess so. I haven't really given this a ton of thought. I'm not really sure where it's at in terms of, you know, actually being a thing versus just a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:09) Oh, it's a thing. It's a thing. They have a facility. They're manufacturing it. I think, what did they pick? I think like North Carolina, some state they picked to actually build a facility in. Another country purchased a Hyperloop thing. Yeah. It's happening.

(Ben at 00:44:25) I mean, I don't see why not. That said, I think train rides, one thing about, one thing I like about trains is, you know, actually, some of them go pretty slow, and that can be a fun experience too. I once took a train from San Francisco all the way to Chicago. There's an Amtrak train called the California Zephyr, and it takes like three days to do that journey. But it's beautiful scenery. You get to meet a lot of people, and so, you know, that has its own appeal. But, of course, if I can zip from one place to another in 20 minutes, and how fast do they go?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) Oh, close to the speed of light. I'm kidding.

(Ben at 00:45:05) Not awful. Maybe close to the speed of sound. I have no idea. But, yeah, you know, that sounds like fun. I would take the Hyperloop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) I know, but they would need to put, we need to put some LCDs in there because I think a lot of them are underground, you know. You would need it to look kind of cool. But I do know what you're talking about. I was very surprised to find out how many active railroads there are in the US, because my wife and I were talking last year, like, "Let's do a unique trip, something interesting." And we found that the railroads, you can go get a luxury railroad car and, you know, take something up to the Carolinas from Florida and it'd only be a couple hours, but it's slow and kind of the sites are beautiful. And so we were like, "Oh, that's kind of neat." And they stop, you can, they'll stop at different stations, you can get off and go around. So I didn't know that existed in our country, and I was like, "That is so cool."

(Ben at 00:46:00) If you ever find yourself needing to go cross-country and you're not in a hurry to get there, then I can highly recommend it. Our journey ended up taking, I think we were delayed by 12 hours, which seemed pretty normal. And most of that was just, basically, somewhere in the Nevada desert, there was a freight train that had broken down ahead of us. And there's just a single track. And so you just got to wait until that train is moving again before you can go. And so we were just sitting there for 11 hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:31) That's crazy. But at least they had air conditioning, right, in the desert and everything.

(Ben at 00:46:36) Yeah. Yeah. And good food, even though after three days, the menu gets repetitive. But yeah, it was definitely a great experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) Now what about the Neuralink brain interface? Did you get one of those implanted in you?

(Ben at 00:46:52) Probably not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) Okay. Alright. We got our first no.

(Ben at 00:46:57) That sounds a little too far out there for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) How many people would have to get it and enjoy it and have a benefit that you knew? How many people before you would be like, okay, yeah, I'll do that?

(Ben at 00:47:09) That's a good question. I haven't thought of it. Say more about the interface. I've just been following this sort of on the side, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:16) So so far, they're putting it into pigs, so that's pretty great. It's going to be used for life-threatening medical things like paralysis and all of that. It's basically what he's doing. There's tons of these brain interfaces out there existing. He did not invent these things. What he did was, and he did the very Musk thing he does where he rebuilds it from the ground up and then it's an order of magnitude higher resolution and you can do so much more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) And if you extend it out, you know, ten, twenty, fifty years, you can easily see that we'll have some sort of API to the brain where we could have calls with each other, you know, do some interesting things. That's the hope of the future. It seems pretty cool, but it would need to be somebody smarter than me that I really respected, that had it and found a significant benefit to it.

(Ben at 00:48:07) Yeah. I probably wouldn't put myself in the early adopter bucket for this one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:12) I know.

(Ben at 00:48:27) Tequila brand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:28) He's done some specialty products. He's done the tequila. No, it was Tesla tequila. You could buy some Tesla tequila. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:36) Yeah.

(Ben at 00:48:36) Okay. Yeah. For sure. I promise you tequila is probably not my go-to drink. But, you know, if I ever find myself in need of a tequila sunrise or, I guess, what else do you use tequila for? Shots.

(Ben at 00:48:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:51) Yeah. You would drink tequila in a Tesla car on the way to the rocket ship. That's it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) Now, have you seen the short shorts he's made?

(Ben at 00:49:02) Not. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:02) Oh, okay. So he does these weird products where he'll just make them and put them online and be like, there are 1,000 of them. He did it with a flamethrower. Would you buy this?

(Ben at 00:49:09) Oh, the flamethrower. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:10) I've seen...

(Ben at 00:49:10) The flamethrower.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) Alright. Would you...

(Ben at 00:49:13) If I had a need for a flamethrower, I would buy his flamethrower. Okay. But I haven't found myself in a situation where I thought I could really use a flamethrower here right now. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:23) Well, you haven't been to the North Pole, my friend.

(Ben at 00:49:26) Yeah. Yeah. If I do start an expedition to the North Pole, I'll make sure to stock up on Elon Musk's flamethrowers. You've given me some ideas for my next vacation once this whole COVID thing is over, and we can travel again. I'll put that on the list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:43) Yeah. Are you guys still locked down pretty hard there? Is it going to be a lockdown through the holidays?

(Ben at 00:49:47) Pretty much. We're just staying here. San Francisco has another stay-at-home order, and so, you know, we're trying our best to stay home and not expose ourselves too much. It's a little sad because my family is in Germany. My wife's family is in the UK, and so we won't get to see any of them. But I think that's for the best this time. And, you know, I hope next year will be a different story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:09) Yeah. My wife and I, we have a lot of friends from other countries, or friends that live here who have family in other countries. We have friends in other countries. And it's been interesting. There's a lot of different holidays that have been shaken up because, you know, normally the parents come over from the UK or from Australia or with their friends and everything like that. And, you know, it's just changed because those countries are just like, their visas are shut down. They're like, we're not—you don't get to move countries right now. So...

(Ben at 00:50:37) Yeah. And vice versa. I don't think my parents would be allowed to come here right now with the US travel restrictions. So yeah. No one can go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:45) Well, Zoom. Zoom it up. Family Zoom. That's yeah.

(Ben at 00:50:48) That's what we've been doing. Zoom. So it's Zoom for work, Zoom for personal life, Zoom for everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:57) 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, every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.