Yinon Ravid

@myfirstmilpod @chadjanis Potential for much bigger than $1B business. We do this @albertapp and have millions of customers. Next level is agents working in the background on money busywork: pay your credit cards/loans, do your taxes, monitor your finances, etc. This is what we're launching with Genius.

Whoever builds this idea first is guaranteed a $1B exit in two years. @chadjanis just sold Gruns to Unilever for $1.2B. Here is his next top-tier idea that he's giving away for free: The problem: your paycheck hits your checking account, then you need willpower to allocate it. Put 10% in savings, pay bills, invest, whatever. Most people FAIL. The solution: become the distribution layer between direct deposit and your bank account. Before the money hits your account, it automatically splits: 20% → taxes (sitting in money market until tax season) 25% → rent/car payment/bills 15% → investments 10% → savings What hits your checking? $500 for groceries You never see the full amount. You can't fail at budgeting because there's nothing to budget. This works for businesses too. Founders want guaranteed profit extraction. VCs want forced financial discipline. Everyone buys. The infrastructure exists and the market is waiting. The first person to build this is getting acquired in 24 months. @thesamparr @ShaanVP

Welcoming @Albertapp as our new official jersey patch partner! ​ Our partnership with Albert, the personal financial assistant app, marks a historic investment in the Dream franchise & a step forward in our commitment to financial empowerment and education in our community.

We're doing this at @albertapp at scale (millions of customers). The hard part, of course, is the actions. We've spent 10 yrs building products in PFM, money movement, saving, investing, borrowing, etc. In the coming weeks we're shipping v1 of what you're describing. I'm already running it on my machine. Not surprisingly, it's very powerful. DM me!

Who’s working on this idea: Openclaw for personal finance - integrates w all your banks/cards/etc - understands tax returns and filings - monitors portfolio and competitors - digests proprietary data sources (credit card panels, app rankings, and etc) - reads company news and X Etc etc

Triage—not work—is taking over our time. Every morning I wake up to emails, slacks, calls and texts. You probably do too: cold emails/texts, a few important messages, mixed with a lot of noise. Here's how to get your focus back: foundation.news/saying-no/

Meet Genius.

We're beyond excited to announce that we're the official financial partner of the WNBA's @LASparks and @DallasWings. 🤩 Look for our logo on the jerseys and on the court starting this May. Go Sparks, go Wings!

Read more: fnd.news/4hKMbkJ Founders and leaders often say that the best times at a company are the early days, in large part because their schedule was open on day 1. But this thinking is backwards. You should be more productive as the company grows. When your company is tiny, you have to do everything yourself, from running payroll to restocking toilet paper. As you grow, you have resources and leverage to do more. But you must fight the urge to meet; you must keep an open schedule. As a leader, you have to build a great team. Once you've built a team, you have 3 jobs: 1. Get the team rowing in the same direction: make sure everyone knows what they should be doing. You can do this with weekly planning, clear documentation, and frequent async updates. 2. Know how things are actually going: measure how things are actually going with data. Track every experiment carefully. Build dashboards for every feature and release. Transparency creates buy in. 3. Contribute to the work product: the best leaders lead by example. Find time to contribute in your area of genius. Your team will be inspired by watching you work. Click on the link above to see my personal calendar, and how I have implemented these principles.

In 2015, my cofounder and I were the only employees at Albert. I spent all of my time building. Once we launched a product, meetings stacked. It took years to get back to an open schedule. Here’s how I did it: 👇

@pitdesi @rrhoover I had one in a bathroom at an apt I rented in Florence. It was surprisingly nice actually. I think it works used sparingly and for a room you really can’t get natural light into.

@rrhoover Yeah me too! Haven’t found anyone who has one yet :(

Read more: fnd.news/3tsHfNl In early August 2017, after one last unsuccessful fundraising attempt, we had one option left: ask customers to pay. We needed to be sure that customers loved the product enough to pay for it long-term, so we asked every user to pay what they thought was fair. We showed a slider ranging from $0 to $14 a month, and the user could pick any value. On the morning of August 11, 2017, we launched the slider. Over half of our users voluntarily chose to pay more than $0, averaging $4 per month. Albert went from $0 to $1 million in annual recurring revenue almost overnight. We had almost missed the most obvious way to build a sustainable business: charging the customer. On this journey, we've learned three important principles to building a successful paid product: 1. Bundling. Charge less for the entire service than the total cost of all individual features bought separately elsewhere. This has worked well for Albert. 2. Clear pricing. Customers want to know what a service truly costs them. 3. Onboarding friction. One of the most unintuitive things about charging customers is that the added friction is a good thing. When a customer makes a decision to pay for a service, even if for a free trial, they're committing to investing enough time in the service to find out if they will use it. In fact, this principle is so powerful—albeit counterintuitive—that Albert's onboarding flow is over 50 screens! Millions of people have completed this flow. By the end of the onboarding flow, we know if we have a dedicated customer and the customer knows if they want to dedicate themselves to the product. A win for both sides. Charging customers brings focus. Removing "free" brings clear focus across a company. Everyone at the company knows who to serve, who to support, and who to build for. Costs are aligned with revenue. Perhaps most important is the clear message to the customer: vote with your wallet. If you don't like the product enough to pay for it, you'll leave. The company knows that it must always deliver a great product, because mediocrity will be punished with churn and lost revenue.

In August 2017, Albert ran out of cash. We had 50k devoted users, but Albert was free, so we lost money. Here’s the story of how we went from free to paid, and how it completely changed our trajectory 👇

Read more: fnd.news/3RucPno I recently heard a story from a friend of someone who won a charity auction for dinner with Warren Buffett. Trying to schedule with Warren, he suggested that his assistant find time that worked for both of them. On the spot, Warren offered dinner the next evening. Warren Buffet, famous investor and CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world, keeps his calendar open. He focuses on his work above all else. In every organization, there are two forces: acceleration and deceleration. One group of people focuses on building; the other slows things down with process. Organizations overrepresented by decelerators stagnate. One company activity disproportionately drives deceleration: meeting. Meetings corrode teams. Below are a set of principles for thinking about the impact and cost of meetings: 1. Double time to measure true cost: A standalone half hour meeting actually costs a full hour because the meeting will likely start and end late, and you have to switch contexts before and after. 2. Meeting is not working: No work is done during a meeting. 3. Schedule matters: Three back to back to back 30 minute meetings cost a fraction of three standalone 30 minute meetings spread throughout the day. 4. Recurring meetings are toxic: If you find yourself in more than one or two recurring meetings a week, you must change course. Unless there's an acute issue to solve, let people work. 5. Over-meeting drives deceleration: People meeting the most are most likely the ones decelerating an organization. Over a nearly a decade of building and running Albert, I've developed a schedule that works. Click on the link above for my actual calendar.

Meetings are toxic. They drive low morale and a feeling of running in place. Pageantry over progress. Here’s a fresh approach to scheduling and maximizing work 👇

Read more: fnd.news/49UuYli. If you've started a company, you've felt anxiety at some point on your journey. Probably panic too. You're not anxious about one specific thing, as you'd rationally think you might be. You have delocalized anxiety. Perhaps you feel nausea, or crawling out of your own skin, or you're surrounded by cacophony. But you’re not crazy. Building something new is an epic, body-and-mind consuming challenge that pushes you. Like many things that drive growth, this is painful. Building something is similar to running hard. Sprint a mile as hard as you can and you'll feel terrible at the end. Now try a few of those sprints in a row. Building a company is a long collection of back to back one-mile sprints. Building something from scratch forces your brain to run as hard as possible for a long time. Anxiety is like lactic acid buildup in the brain. Just like your muscles get sore, your mind does too. This is not to minimize anxiety of the builder, but to call it what it is: pain from extreme mental exertion. To build something great, exertion is required. The question I've long asked myself: must this exertion be accompanied by panic? Fortunately, the answer is no. It took me many years of building a company to discover the two things most effective at minimizing builder's anxiety. Click on the link above to read more.

Builder anxiety is common. If you've founded a startup or a small business, like tens of millions of Americans, you've felt anxiety. Over the past decade, I’ve learned a lot about ways to mitigate this feeling. 👇

During the zero-interest-rate-period, investors and companies ignored generations of team building lessons. "We're hiring! " was stamped on LinkedIn profiles everywhere to signal a company's success. Companies hired quickly instead of developing talent, forgetting that the only way to scale a top performing organization is by developing and training talent from within. At Albert, we try to follow what I first saw work at 23 years old. My career started as an intern. We have hired all current executives with only two approaches: 1. Promote from within 2. First time executive with deep prior domain experience Every time we've worked with an executive search firm or hired an expert who has done the same role elsewhere, the leaders have not succeeded. It took me years to understand that leaders promoted from within, or given the opportunity to be first time executives with the right tools, are far more effective than their peers. Click the link above to read more about how we’ve hired each leader at Albert, what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

Read more: fnd.news/47tSseX When I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my career. In late 2006, after an unfulfilling year at a consulting firm, I tried joining an investment firm. I had no experience. No investment banking internships in college; never read a 10-K; no idea what made a good company or a bad one. After months of searching, I met my future boss, Robert. Robert ran the trading desk at Oak Hill Advisors, a hedge fund and asset manager in New York City. Robert was looking for someone who had recently graduated from college to join the trading desk. This was how he had started his career at Salomon Brothers in the mid 1980s, and he followed a model that he had seen work. After an interview of math questions (no point asking me about investing because I knew nothing), he agreed to a one month internship. My first assignment was building an Excel model of the fund's future financials with a scenario machine in Visual Basic. I got the job in early 2007. Less then a year after I joined the firm, Bear Stearns collapsed, and Oak Hill's trader was unreachable on vacation. I traded my first bond. I had been promoted from within. This worked well for both sides: the firm was able to train me to do things the right way, and I was loyal to the firm, ultimately staying for many years.

Promote the intern. This is advice I got early in my career, and I’ve seen it work over and over since. We followed this approach at Albert to build a top leadership team. Here’s how we did it 👇

@Billy_Draper @pitdesi @mint @copilotmoney A simple layer would be great if possible (I still have a spreadsheet), but the data from financial institutions still sucks so PFM fails to deliver. This is why 50% retention in yr 1 is considered good in PFM. Impossible to build venture scale with that retention.

@pitdesi @mint I understand but disagree! Simple layer/window between people and their finances becomes more valuable as time goes on and fintech options skyrocket. Ad-supported model may not make sense* *talking my own book as I'm an investor in @copilotmoney

Heard of a few people building a new version of @mint now that Intuit shut it down. I wouldn't recommend it if you want to build a venture-scale business. There aren't that many people who want to actively manage their finances; startup graveyard is littered with PFM's.

@pitdesi Pure PFM—just budgeting like YNAB—doesn't work at venture scale in part bc CAC is so high, but mostly bc churn is very high (50% truly retained in yr 1 is good). "PFM" works if you build the tools on top of financial products: banking, saving, investing, etc.