Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: How Public’s Winning the Great Wealth Transfer

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. On today's show, we are joined by Life.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Abraham. Life is the co-founder of public, the serious investing app of the future for millennials and the great wealth transfer. And how many more buzzwords can I fit in here? I would call them my thinking is they're like the, they're the middle ground, right? The more mature investor after you've just started out, then you'd be. come on return. It's like, okay, I actually have some money. What do I do with it? Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, the, the, let's not beat around the bush. The 800 pound gorilla and the

Starting point is 00:01:08 digital custody space is Robin Hood. And what public is doing is very different, very, very different. I've mentioned before that my Bitcoin, unfortunately, is stuck at Robin Hood. I can't get it out for whatever New York regulatory reasons. I don't know. But so anyway, so I'm on the app frequently. and it is very easy. It's very smooth, but that's all it is. And for better or for worse, that's just that's what it is. It's an app where you could buy and sell stocks really quickly and there's no friction. It's very easy.

Starting point is 00:01:38 And for what it is, it's phenomenal. Public is different. Public is building more of a traditional but tech powered custodian where it feels very similar to, I guess, you know, life said he views more. His competitor is not really a robin, but more of. of a more of a Schwab and, uh, and fidelity. And it does feel like that. When you log onto the platform and you look at it, it feels like what a modern platform should look and feel like. Yes. Yeah, you're right. It feels like it's actually made recently because it was and because the, the incumbents, the rails that they were built on are from, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:02:19 the 80s. Yeah. And I don't want to step on too much of what, of this talk, but talking about where they're going and the stuff they can do in the future, the whole idea of customization in the future, it's going to present so many opportunities for investors. It's going to also lead to some landmines because too much customization is going to be overwhelming for certain people. But the tools for individual investors that we're going to see in the years ahead, they already see, I always say every year it's the best time ever to be an individual investor. It's only going to get better and better from here. Yeah, they have a lot of exciting things that we only scratch the surface of.

Starting point is 00:02:53 So please enjoy our conversation with Life, Abraham. Life, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, let's start here. I don't think, in fact, let me not caveat it. I know that I have never heard the origin story of public. What was the inspiration for launching this company?

Starting point is 00:03:14 Essentially, Janik and I came together. And what we realized was that that first generation, of the, you know, kind of like kind of new broker apps that were out there. It was all very heavily focused in speculation, options trading, crypto only place, CFD trading in Europe, et cetera. And that, so to say that next generation, Schwab has not really been built yet. And so our thought was essentially that's, you know, go out and build something for people to kind of seriously build their wealth and give them the tool to do so.

Starting point is 00:03:48 And that was a little bit like the initial kernel, right? And from there, there were different features in ways of how we executed that over time. But, generally speaking, that's kind of kernel-stuck truth. Where do you even begin in this process because of all the different rules and regulations when it comes? Because there's got to be a lot of mountains that need to be moved to actually make this happen in the financial services industry. Yeah, I mean, the very first thing is just you got to be an actual broker-dealer in the U.S., right? And so we actually acquired a broker-dealer license as part of the founding of the company, essentially. And that was like that very first kickoff.

Starting point is 00:04:21 We started off with just stocks in the early days. And that's where it started. And then the core kernels also was we were the first to do fractional investing in the US. And so the ability to really like real-time trade fractional stocks. And it obviously had these two aspects. Number one, a lower barrier of entry, especially because it was a time before stock stocks splits became cool again. And, you know, Amazon and Coe were like two grand a share and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:04:46 And then on the other end, also just from a mindset perspective, that like because this generation also grew up on things like crypto, just the mindset of investing has always been much more of, you know, what's my allocation and dollar amounts and such, which obviously fractionalization makes possible in the first place. Ben and I were talking two weeks ago about the S-Tax report from Schwab. And I had this realization, which is like their, a look at their, the investors on that, their platform and how they're behaving.

Starting point is 00:05:14 And I had this realization, like, there isn't one investor. We talk about what the investor is doing and based on different surveys, based on different platforms, economists, hedge funds, retail, whatever, like there isn't one consensus way that people invest.

Starting point is 00:05:29 It is so different so that you can craft any narrative based on any available data out there. All right. So with that said, how would you describe the, and I know, again, I just said it's not one investor,

Starting point is 00:05:40 but how would you describe maybe the average public investor? or on your platform? The average public investor is like a buy and hold investor who basically keeps compounding their portfolio also just through the paychecks they're getting on a bi-reli-a-monthly basis. And so they just keep adding to their portfolio.

Starting point is 00:06:00 They have certain specifically names that they believe in, very heavy also just single stock pickers, not just ETFs and such. And yeah, they kind of combo their portfolio over time. That's like the most general behavior we're seeing. And if you look at the space, And you kind of look between the, you know, active trading platforms and the what we would call like investing platforms. And they all kind of merge in some regard, right?

Starting point is 00:06:23 We also have some options of the platform, things like that. But just from a core perspective, on one side of the spectrum, we are more on the speculative side of options trading, futures and so on. Even from a customer profile perspective, like you have lifetimes of customers of two years or less, right? So you have to kind of reacquire people all the time because people burn out of their accounts. stay churn, you know, and so on. And that's the, that is even just from the, from a user behavior, but then also from like a business model perspective, what those kind of platforms are kind of like, like sticking in, right?

Starting point is 00:06:55 And on the other end, you have basically the portfolio of builder investing platforms. And in that world, you have lifetimes of 30 years plus, right? And so, you know, for us, you know, we're still a younger platform. Our lifetimes are like, you know, call it 25 years and so on right now. But, and so the behavior is very different. because people don't burn to their accounts because they're, you know, participating in less speculative behavior, right? And so those two sides are a little bit different.

Starting point is 00:07:22 And obviously, as these platforms grow over time, you will start to play in those sides a little bit. You'll see that with Schwab as well, right? Like, you know, literally bought TD and stuff like that, which is, you know, obviously way heavy active trading. And so, you know, over time, you obviously play in multiple camps. But I think from the DNA of the company you are in the early days, in our industry, I think you have to pick a side.

Starting point is 00:07:44 a little bit. And we were much more born out of the investing portfolio building side than we were born out of the active trading side. So how much competition do you feel among all the different firms? Because there are obviously different types of clients that are attracted to different types of firms. I would imagine that your user base skews younger. Yeah. Depends on what you define younger. Like our average age is like 38 roughly, I think. See, I would define that as middle age. Michael still thinks that's pretty young. 38 is young. Come on. Like, I would call it, very young, very young, of course. I would call it like our base is really millennials. Like if you look at our age breakdown, like the biggest vast millennials. We were

Starting point is 00:08:26 talking about how the Vanguard study, How America Saves yesterday in Animal Spirits. And the big takeaway for us that is absolutely music to our ears is the auto enrollment and the amount that people are contributing and increasing on a yearly basis. You mentioned that your users, your investors are concerned about building wealth sustainably over long periods of time. You mentioned the paycheck aspect of it. So tell us more, like how it sounds like their paychecks are connected to the platform. Like, how are they using it? How is how is the setup? Like talk about that. What we're seeing is a little bit two types of behaviors there. One is truly automated recurring investing, and we have a tool called investment plans on the app where you can

Starting point is 00:09:15 just set it up, you define a certain strategy and just like continuously at a certain internal that you define invest into those strategies. That's one. The other is really people putting money into basically like depositing their cash that they're getting through the paychecks and so on into the platform, leaving it more like high yield scenarios, high yield cash, bond account, things like that that we have, and then basically circle that out of that into, you know, mostly equities in most cases, when they kind of see opportunities appear, right? And I'm sure you've heard about this just like retail investing culture of the dip buying. And I think that's very specific also to like that kind of millennial and younger generation

Starting point is 00:09:58 because, you know, these people basically, in most cases, entered the markets after 08. And, you know, after the financial crisis, it took, I think, five and a half years. years or so for the S&P to recover, that was like the longest kind of dip that was there. But if you entered after 08, you essentially were in this like crazy, super long bull market cycle. And most dips that these people have experienced were pretty V-shaped, right? Like they recovered fairly quickly. And so through that experience, they've kind of adapted this kind of culture of dip buying. And so we see a lot of people kind of move things into cash and then circle that out whenever

Starting point is 00:10:37 they see like a dip buying or similar opportunity in certain names that they're looking for and stuff like that. So what type of tools are investors expecting these days when they come to you? Like what do they want to see that makes their lives easier? First of just multi-asset. Like generally speaking, people want to, you know, it's not just stocks anymore. Even though, again, the generation kind of grew up on that a little bit, but I think that has changed a lot, especially also with crypto and so on. So multi-asset is a big one. And I think the second part is that because it's so much more mobile now as well, and like we were born mobile, that was the first platform that we launched on, obviously, your investing app, like your brokerage is not just a place where you execute trades.

Starting point is 00:11:23 It's a place where you follow the markets. And, you know, obviously, we've done a lot of work with AI and different data sources and, you know, charts in the app. and fundamentals on companies and all that kind of stuff, where, you know, we essentially give people, you know, this sort of real-time insights around certain names, around, you know, the markets and macro in general, and so on. And so they don't just open the app to check their portfolio and how it's doing. They don't just open it to make a trade, but they're also opening it because it's their window into the markets. And so I think that bar of your brokerage, not just being, you know, the execution venue, but it's also the place where

Starting point is 00:12:04 you follow what's happening in the markets. I think that is, I think, a more drastic kind of change, especially for this generation. The platform gives you a lot more than some of the other digital apps where you're just swiping like Tinder to buy or sell a stock. How are you thinking about what is appropriate? What do investors want? What's too much? How do you think about striking the right balance?

Starting point is 00:12:28 That is essentially the hardest part of the day to day. We always talk internally about this thing of balancing sophistication and simplicity. And there is an aspect where when you go too simple, it gets dumped down, which also means there's certain customers that will not really think it's for them anymore, you know? And on the other hand, you always have to make sure that it doesn't become too complicated. And so, like, striking that balance is always the kind of hardest piece. And honestly, like, I mean, this goes into the nitty gritty of just the product is of it and literally like information hierarchy and stuff like that and, you know, how do you access

Starting point is 00:13:05 certain features in the app and so on? So it gets very kind of like design nerdy in that moment. But, but yeah, like if you as our product design team, I think that it's the toughest challenge to always strike that balance. Because our user is generally speaking a little bit more sophisticated than maybe some new brokers in the space. And so, you know, our core demographic is really called it like the top 20, 25% of, you know, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Excess. And so people that have money left over at the end of the month are put into the markets, people that have some savings, people that might inherit a decent amount of money and so on.

Starting point is 00:13:40 And what comes with that audience also is that they are fairly financial literate. They are fairly literate on the markets. And so their expectations are a little different. And they care about things like, can I trade my tax lots and stuff like that? Because they're sophisticated enough to care about how to manage your taxes around. it, how to read a company's balance sheet, et cetera, et cetera. So you mentioned the AI piece. Where are we going in terms of the tools that you can think are coming in the years

Starting point is 00:14:08 ahead with this? Yeah, I mean, we are big believers that AI is going to play a massive role in portfolio construction and management. And we recently launched this thing called generatedassets.com, which currently lives as an own site, but we can essentially turn any idea that you have in form of a prompt into an investable index. And so you can be like, you know, we're on a podcast, right? And it can be like, oh, give me an index of companies where the executives run the podcast,

Starting point is 00:14:36 you know, and then it's turned, then it basically looks for that and turns that into an index and gives you those companies, tells you why these companies were added. There's a little reasoning of like, you know, the information that had found about these companies of why they were added base of your prompt. It gives us a sort of waiting on that. It comes up with a name, a description for it and so on. And then soon, and those are going to be investable in public. And I think what that really does, for example, it's the first step to number

Starting point is 00:14:58 one really disrupt essentially ETFs because they become super customizable and essentially infinite in creation. So although you can add as many rules as you want to something like this, say, hey, I want it to be tactical. So every month I want, if these stocks are in a downtrend or these are an uptrend, go long, these or short these or sell these or whatever, you can add all these types of rules. That's your two layers to, right? The first layer is just the first creation of the index, which is like what is your definition

Starting point is 00:15:24 of why a company should be part of the strategy? And then the second layer, and that comes a little later, is exactly what you're saying, is being able to set up, like, trading rules and stuff, right? Like the one that I'm always talking about because it got kind of viral on Twitter, how much it outperforms is the, what was it, by the close, sell the open. Oh, right. Just do that every day. And apparently that performs really well, historically speaking.

Starting point is 00:15:49 And so, like, there are things like that that you can set up at somebody as well. But now we're looking more as set up basically your own type of, of, you know, ETF, so to say, have Texas harvesting built in, have some customization built in, and so on. And that essentially runs

Starting point is 00:16:05 on like an own direct indexing engine that we have built internally, which runs on that fractional layer that we have, which makes it possible in the first place. And the technology makes it easy, so there's not a ton of operational heavy lifting for you if you have all these

Starting point is 00:16:15 thousands of different strategies operating at the same time? It is all on the tech layer. And that is exactly what's kind of the beauty of it where, you know, if you want to spit up, spin up,

Starting point is 00:16:25 you know, 100,000 ETFs tomorrow. It's going to cost you a lot of money. It's going to be a massive team to manage that. It's going to be a huge legal work, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, there's certain regulation around of like how much, you know, quality rebalancing, et cetera, et cetera. If that is all managed on the tech layer, you can go fully custom.

Starting point is 00:16:47 And so you could even be like, you could even do things like, I want the top 50 of the, NASDAQ 100. And by the way, because I want only tech companies, take out Costco, you know, and that becomes your version of QQQQ, so to say, that you have edited to your liking and to your strategy that you can then run,

Starting point is 00:17:10 you know, and then you have the developers like Tesla's harvesting building and things like that. So you said this is a separate website? So this is right now living as an own side because it's just like a preview a little bit of like the index building. And then, you know, within the next, you know, a few months that's going to launch in the public app.

Starting point is 00:17:24 and then it's all investable and whatnot. How, okay, so I love that idea. Obviously, customization is a huge trend in the industry. How difficult or easy is it going to be for somebody like me that has absolutely no experience on the technical side of things? Super easy. It's literally, it's a free-form field. You can type in, give me companies with low app you,

Starting point is 00:17:50 but large user basis, for example. So it's literally just a prompt that you can type in. It's literally just a prompt. And it would show you the list of companies and then you would basically say, yes, that looks right? Correct. Correct. And you can change weighting. You can see why these companies were picked.

Starting point is 00:18:04 You can add things. If you'd be like, oh, I think you're missing this one company, you can just like tell it and it might add it to it. Oh, I love that idea. And so you can completely customize it and whatnot. And obviously the other piece where we're like seeing AI really play a massive role is that I do believe it's also going to disrupt financial advisors to some extent. We've been talking about this a lot. I want to hear your take. Yeah, I think there is an aspect of two things, right?

Starting point is 00:18:29 If I can go on like a little rant for a second, then, you know. So first off, what's going to happen with the great wealth transfer is not just a transfer of wealth, it's also a transfer of relationships. And the average Asia financial advisor in the country is going up every year. Younger people are not becoming advisors anymore, that industry is kind of consolidating. And so you have less advisors, hand-loyal. more clients and their advisors getting older. Now, there's going to be moments where their clients are suddenly going to become drastically

Starting point is 00:19:01 younger because that wealth will trickle down and basically get inherited by those children of their original clients, so to say. And those younger people are going to have opinions on what to do with that money. These are people that grew up self-directed first. They grew up with investing accounts earlier in their lives. They grew up with social media content on podcasts, on finance. They're way more financial literate early in their lives. And so they are way more confident in their abilities to manage their own portfolios.

Starting point is 00:19:31 And so they're going to look at their financial advisor and be like, yo, Chad, I really like what you did for my family here. But, you know, let me take a third of this or half of it and manage it myself. And I would really love your take on the future of GLP1 drugs. And the guy will be like, GLP what? And that's where it's going to start. And so it's not just a transfer. wealth, the transfer of relationships. And so I think a lot of these relationships are going to deteriorate.

Starting point is 00:19:56 And then, you know, a lot of those funds are going to move into platforms like public. Obviously, that's our thesis, of course, you know, speaking my book here, Papa. And so, you know, I think that is really number one. I think the second is that the more literate you are, the more you will also be skeptical on advice that someone is giving you. because you have, because it's easier for you to poke holes in the stuff, you know, and to see certain things. And, you know, and that means also that, you know, AI does necessarily have an own book. And so what that means is that AI, you can maybe trust a little bit more.

Starting point is 00:20:37 Obviously, I can be fed with bias by a human when it gets set up. But generally speaking, you know, if an advisor gives you some advice, you know, does the advisor, you know, need a new boat or is really the best thing for you to invest in. And so there is some of that skepticism that I think comes specifically with the younger generation that is more financially literate potentially that will open up more opportunity for AI alternatives in financial advice and also just guidance. It doesn't have to be advice always. Love it.

Starting point is 00:21:12 So are Ben and I in trouble? My take is that I just think this totally strengthens the DIY. case because there are, listen, there's a lot of people who follow our content, who are DIY people who really love consuming our content, and they are totally in the spreadsheets and they love doing this themselves. And I think for those people, the tools are going to be massive. And I think especially the people who have been overlooked by advisors before, I think that is a huge growth opportunity of people who just have never, who have always wanted to try something and reach out, but have never, well, I don't have the assets or I don't

Starting point is 00:21:43 have the know-how or I don't know who to reach out to. If they have the applications of AI to ask questions and not feel like an idiot. I agree that is going to help. I think it's going to help way more people on the middle, lower end, even than the higher end in terms of numbers. And on the super nerdy other end, it's like we just launched

Starting point is 00:22:02 last week, like a full API access to your account. And so now in public you can get access through API to your account. You can trade through API. You can, you know, use it to, you know, extract your data and put into some spreadsheet that you're like, basically like full API access to your account. And that is not just for like hardcore algorithmic traders and so on. That is also because this whole idea of like vibe coding, you know, where you basically use AI tools to, you know, actually program a little bit yourself, that is becoming much more of a thing and it's becoming much easier.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And so this, the sense of that like the, like, hardcoreness of knowing how to program in order to like run certain strategies that you like or extract. data from your account to get more insights on it and so on. That is democratizing more and more now with AI. And so suddenly things like, well, I want some access to my API keys becomes a way more broadly, you know, normal thing in the future. Speaking about what the future generation is going to want, or maybe the current generation, but the one that is going to get a lot of wealth in the future, there was an article in Bloomberg last week about alternative investment. everything from collectibles to private stuff and everything in between. You brand yourself as a platform for the serious investor.

Starting point is 00:23:29 Does the serious investor actually want all of these different buckets of investing? I think the general answer is yes. I think the issue is that the instruments that most alternative investments are offered to are still a little tricky for broad-based, for like the more general public and number one is liquidity just the notion of you know if you invest into an SPV of SpaceX or into a private credit fund or whatever it's just harder sometimes to get out and so you have to be a little bit wealthy enough to you know have enough funds as part of your portfolio that you can like literally stash away for a few years you know

Starting point is 00:24:11 for these things to mature and whatnot forever for you to get some money back and so I think that from an instrument's perspective is just still tricky to get it to a point where it's like really broad adoption but generally speaking I would say yes

Starting point is 00:24:25 that a lot of people have what we have learned like we used to have more alternative assets on the platform and we had that through this regulatory framework reg A plus

Starting point is 00:24:32 which essentially like you turn any alternative asset into a sort of mini publicly traded company and therefore turn it into like actual tradable security

Starting point is 00:24:41 so you could take a piece of art or you can take you know we took music royalties of a movie and stuff like that and turn that into these investable assets. Now, the issue with that is though

Starting point is 00:24:52 that's one of the reasons why we stopped doing this, by the way, is that these assets have a very fixed AUM essentially. And so let's say you are buying into, you know, the Shrek royalties that we had, for example. And the Shrek royalties was an asset that was called it five million bucks, you know? Now, that is just five million bucks. And so now people would get a piece of this.

Starting point is 00:25:22 And the issue is now that the float in this is so low that if you make it essentially a borderline like regular trading liquidity on that, that because the float is so low, you're artificially ending up pumping prices. And then you get to this scenario where people are sitting on because they might not have been formed enough, because they might, you might. you know, we just thought it was cool or whatever, and suddenly they're sitting on a super inflated price of an asset, and at some point, liquidity will dry out because you can't find someone who will actually want to buy, you know, at anywhere close to this highly inflated price. And so you have this issue of these inflated pricing that goes up because the flow is just so low, you know?

Starting point is 00:26:08 And I think that's also a little bit of what you've seen now with that tokenization. You know, you obviously saw, you know, our dear friends at Robin Hood launching this like tokenized you know, SpaceX and Open AI stocks and stuff. And that's essentially the same thing, right? It's like behind the scenes, it's some SPV with some shares that they bought secondary or whatever from that company. And then that token will, I would assume, will be freely tradable. But because the float on that token will likely be very low, there's a high risk of

Starting point is 00:26:38 these things to just inflate very much. And so suddenly the valuation of Open AI, for example, in form of this token, It's $3 trillion. Exactly. It will be like multi-times of what the actual variation of the company is and stuff. So like these things are tricky, right? And there are obviously like, you know, there's things like, you know, I know Goldman, for example, runs like a, you know, placements of private shares and pre-IPO

Starting point is 00:27:01 companies and stuff like that. And like, you know, like private banks like that for some rich clients. They do it and essentially where liquidity only happens when there is a official new mark and then they transact at that new mark, you know. But again, you have to wait for that to open. and set about it. The system is still tricky to make it broadly available. I think it's okay working for people that have the money and that can wait to get liquidity. I think it is tough still to make it happen broadly for return investors who might not necessarily have, you know, the means

Starting point is 00:27:31 to stack away a few thousand dollars to not and not have them access for, you know, potentially a few years. So it sounds like you are not hopping on the tokenization bandwagon, at least not today? Not today, not today. I think there's, yeah, I feel like there's, there's more to figure out, so the same. We were talking about this. Do you think that some of these private companies are going to be kind of against this? Because you said it could mess with the valuation and the looks and maybe they don't want to see daily marks on their, on their valuation. There's, there's an obvious regulatory arbitrage here, right? Where if you want to buy private shares on that company, you have to be an accredited investor.

Starting point is 00:28:14 You will, as part of being a credit investor, you know, you will have to make a decision based of the information that you received about the company if you want to make that investment or not. Public companies are public companies. They're called public because you publicly have to disclose their financials and so on. And that is part of giving everyone the same access, the same information, the same chance, to make the right decisions for that investment. That is not happening in private investments the same way.

Starting point is 00:28:39 And that's why you have things like accreditation laws. And if they're done well or not, that's a whole other topic. but there is something around, you know, if you want to make private companies more accessible for return investors, then you also kind of need to do a little bit to make sure that these investors aren't formed well and that it's just not necessarily happening right now, right?

Starting point is 00:28:58 And so that's the other tricky piece. And so suddenly like, so and then the tokenization is essentially a way to go around things like accreditation laws. And again, right now it's not launched in the US anyway, so that's not necessarily happening yet. But it's a little bit of like a regular type of arbitrage because then you have certain jurisdictions of countries that have, you know, certain regulation around cryptos that might not have thought through yet how a token might be used as form as a wrapper of a private investment or a wrapper of a somewhere custody public stock or whatever, you know.

Starting point is 00:29:31 And so there is some regulatory arbitrage that also creates risk for the people that invest into this stuff, right? Like you mentioned earlier like going the being the the the the Schwab for millennials one of the things that Schwab offers is banking services well above and beyond just the investing portion do you plan on expanding horizontally uh into adjacent areas of money um yes and no so we always say that we're an investing platform and that is our focus and so we're not going to become like we're going to take our plans on to be like the money super app tomorrow like mini fintex or so um but how we look at expansion is really things that go off you investing and so to give an example you know internally we're working on things like credit line around your portfolio um there is two ways of why a user would take money off the platform one because i want it into something else so we got to ensure that we have all the investment offerings that people want so it stays on the platform for us or the pure business those reasons, of course. And then on the second piece, you know, you might need the money to spend.

Starting point is 00:30:38 And do you mind to spend is then like, cool, so what are other forms of liquidity than just selling your stocks and so, you know, to get their money to spend? Credit line, obviously margin is a way to do that too, you know, and that's also where things like, you know, credit cards and stuff can come in in the future. But we look at it really much more from the perspective of, you know, what are the tools around your portfolio to basically make a little bit smarter decisions around your portfolio, not necessarily to be your primary bank account next, right? And the credit card is a good example.

Starting point is 00:31:05 Like, if you want to compete in the credit card space, it's incentives galore, you know, and, you know, it's, you're essentially banking on becoming someone's primary card and you're competing against Amex and Lottnott and, you know, and to chase Sapphire and da-da-da-da-da. That is a very different game to play, you know. And so, like, if, like, when we get into the card space, I mean, we will at some point, we will look at much more about from perspective of like here's here's one way for you to get access to the funds in your account but we might not necessarily say look at it from perspective of like the goal is to be your primary card and so there's like there's like nuances like that of how

Starting point is 00:31:41 you kind of view the world do you view like your competition in terms of like it's a eat what you kill kind of thing and we're against them or do you think that there's just enough people that are going to want what you guys do that you can kind of just focus on your own core competencies and not worry about what the competition is doing I think you kind of always always still have to look at their competition. I mean, it would be, it would be naive not to be very honest. But when we look at our competition, we much more look at like Schwab, Fidelity, you know, thank God to a certain extent.

Starting point is 00:32:09 Like, you know, like those are the ones that we steal assets from and we still customers from much more than at Robin Hood, for example, you know? And that's what we see. Like, we see most ACATs, like most account transfers come from Schwab and Fidelity and so on. And that's really where we see others come from, et cetera. And then again, I think the, the, other piece is really more of like if you look at the growth wealth transfer, most of the funds will actually travel from advisors to self-directed. And that, I think, is actually the much

Starting point is 00:32:40 larger opportunity because if you look at where, you know, people in the U.S. have their investments, it is the majority still held with investment advisors, right? That's where most of the assets sit. And so for a company like ours, that's obviously where a huge opportunity is. Life. Last question for me. I'm curious to know what it's like running such a fast-growing company that has raised a lot of outside money. I know that there is a lot of excitement involved, but also certainly pressure and all that sort of good stuff. So what's that like? It's awesome. It's super fun. All right. So maybe specifically some of the biggest challenges. Like what is, what would you say is the thing that not maybe not like a specific thing but just something that

Starting point is 00:33:33 somebody could take away like what is it like leading such a such a large fast grown company focus focus i think is the hardest hardest hardest hardest thing there is this awesome definition and sorry to like quotes um um an apple person here it's the most cliche thing you can do but there's this great thing that i think jolly ice once said where it's like and i'm kind of slaughtering the quote now it's essentially focus equals sacrifice Focus is not doing the things you wouldn't do anyway. Focus is seeing something that is a great idea that you really should be doing that will be amazing for the business, but you're not pursuing it because you're

Starting point is 00:34:12 focused on something else. And that sacrifice in your day-to-day of like taking the amazing ideas, the shiny objects that are always popping up and putting them on the sidelines and not going after them, I think that is in the day-to-day, one of the hardest things. Love it. Yeah, especially with what you're doing, there are, I'm sure there is no shortage of ideas of potential distractions. So staying focused on your core competency and ultimately what the customer really wants is a great place to end it.

Starting point is 00:34:43 So, Life, really appreciate the time. For people that want to learn more about becoming a serious investor or maybe leaving some old legacy tech behind, where do we send them? You go, send them at public.com. And then also, we have a great concern. service. If you're someone that has, you know, call it $250, $500,000 or more on their account, you know, you can get your dedicated account manager as well. Some of you actually know the name of we pride ourselves to actually provide great service and not just a ticket that goes into Nirvana. And, yeah, and then obviously play with generate assets.com. It's just super

Starting point is 00:35:15 fun. And all that stuff is going to live within the public app very soon, too. A lot of things to come. Very cool. Thank you for life. Appreciate it. Thanks. Check on public.com to learn more, email us, animal spirits at the compound news.com. We'll see you next time.

Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: How Public’s Winning the Great Wealth Transfer

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