The Pomp Podcast - #473 Everett Cook on Building A Modern Fintech

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Everett Cook co-founded Rho Business Banking to fundamentally change the way businesses manage their finances. He also previously spent time as a macro hedge fund trader. In this conversation, we discuss the rise of fintechs, how Rho has navigated the pandemic, why they focus on high growth businesses, and what Everett is able to apply to entrepreneurship from his macro trading days. ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today.  ======================= Own crypto in multiple exchanges and wallets? Sync them to CoinStats so you track and manage them from one place. Track 8000+ coins and 300+ exchanges all from the Coinstats platform. Try it for free or go to coinstats.app/pomp and get 40% off your premium subscription. ======================= Did you know only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistaking picking stocks for serious investing? You can’t control the markets, but you can control your risks. So how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you’re not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million! Imagine...Being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires, at a fraction of the cost. Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and select PODCAST.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Everett Cook co-founded Rowe Business Banking to fundamentally change the way businesses manage their finances. He also previously spent time as a macro hedge fund trader. In this conversation, we discuss the rise of fintechs, how Rowe has navigated the pandemic, why they focus on high growth businesses, and what Everett is able to apply to entrepreneurship from his macro trading days. I really enjoyed this conversation with Everett, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk

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But go to masterworks.io in the meantime, use promo code POMP, and go buy a Basquet, a Basquet, whatever it is. Masterworks.io, use promo code POMP. All right, let's get into this episode with Everett. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by POMP or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his

opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got a very special treat for you today. I've got Everett here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. So let's jump into this and tell us kind of your background. How did you get into the finance world, and then we'll get into building Rowe. Yeah, totally. So I started out when I was in college, I was really interested in markets. I started a couple of companies when I was younger and then started trading stocks and I loved like that world. I left college, went into investment banking. I didn't really know what, you know, the difference is investment banking or trading or, you know, anything was, but this, it was on

Wall Street literally. I went to Deutsche Bank and spent about two years there doing investment banking uh during that period i started in 2007 i left in 2000 in 2009 uh during that period like the great you know the great financial crisis happened um and what was like really interesting to me or what was like really sort of a surprising to me was how few people you know understood what was happening even while it was happening um even inside you know one of the largest investment banks uh in the world and uh at that point i was i i got really interested in global macro And I started reading what, you know, what Peter Thiel was writing and, you know, and some of the other like luminaries in the space like Stan Druckenmiller and other people and felt like these were the people that really only got, the only people that really got it, that understood what was actually happening at the time, not even like in the future. And that's what I wanted to do.

I realized that. And so I went to, I left Deutsche, I went to SAC Capital, worked for, actually for Dan Tapiero, who was on the show recently. And then spent a couple of years at other hedge funds leading and growing research and investing for kind of managers in that space. Got it. Dan is fantastic. He came on and gave me the hard pitch on the gold and Bitcoin both. So he definitely is great. So after you did that, you eventually end up teaming up with a partner and you start Rho. Tell us a little bit about just what the impetus for the idea was. Yeah. I mean, it was pretty simple at the time. It's gotten more complex, but it was really that

FinTech had been going after the very bottom of the market for a very long time, basically since FinTech had started. If you think about FinTech starting in 2010, primarily on the consumer side, it was companies like Chime that went after the lowest end of consumers. And on the business side too, it was companies like all the lending networks that start businesses, we're generally going after very small kind of mom and pop type businesses. And I think there's just this assumption in the market that if a company is big, whether they've raised venture capital, or they have a lot of people, they have some sort of operational complexity, that because they're a good client of the bank,

they're generally happy. The bank is taking care of them. And that was something that we thought was just fundamentally wrong. We thought that actually the companies, the bigger they were, actually like the more problems they had, the more complexity they had, the harder it was to be like really good at servicing them and the more technology that they needed to do better. That was sort of my top down, you know, 30,000 foot view. I came in from as a like investor type and my partner, Alex, who I teamed up with was an operator. He was chief product officer at a company called List, which has, you know, a couple hundred people between New York and London. And it scaled a couple other companies in the past. And he would hit these growing pains every

time he came into a company and you know took it from 30 to you know 100 200 people um so our perspective was that we can fix that and that this is like actually the best way to you know go into this market that's 120 billion dollar market that is pretty commoditized um and uh but has like a lot of room for growth if you can like move past the basic product um got it and so talk a little bit about as you guys have started building the business it seems like you've got a ton of different kind of product lines and have really built out a pretty compelling solution for these types of high growth businesses. What does that look like in practice in terms of the various touch points you have with the customer? Yeah. I mean, so we started out just building the basic

like banking sort of core infrastructure, right? Checking account, we have a treasury management product and a card product. Those are kind of like the building blocks for everything else that came after that. And then we started going past. So like building a comprehensive like budgeting platform that allows companies to set you know quarterly annual budgets for different lines and attribute all their expenses to those um you know deeper syncing with accounting that way everything kind of is live real time uh user management accounts payable like there's a there's a lot in the product um you know not every company uses everything and that's kind of the point it's meant to be kind of continue to grow with you but um you know the our perspective is always like

that that the financial services are you know they need to be best in class they need to be priced competitively um but fundamentally like what what matters is like the stuff that actually helps people get their job done every single day um and so that's where we invest all our time and as we grow like you know we think about what do we add that's adjacent to our product that you know cfos and finance teams are using every single day that's interfacing with banking um and that's where we'll continue to grow i mean we just launched accounts payable um which again it always blew my mind that that was like a separate product to begin with that a company like like bill.com, for example, can be so big, performing such a, you

know, discrete function. So that's, that's kind of where we're headed. Got it. And why the focus on those high growth businesses, again, like, there's tons of checking products, there's tons of Treasury management products, but like, you're not only differentiating in some of the features, and kind of the efficacy of the product, but you're also specifically focusing on a certain part of the market. So like, how do you

think about that? Yeah, market? I mean, what we thought very early on was the market does not need another checking account. The market does not need another bank account. Yeah, you can do low fees and all that stuff. That's been done 100 times. Not to say that someone won't make money doing that, but that wasn't the game we wanted to play. What the market did need was companies need help as they grow. And they need help from a personal level and they need help from a technology level. And banks weren't automatically overnight going to become great at building technology and software like they're not right like most of the software that you buy from a bank or the software

that you rent from a bank i guess is like fis or visor right it's built by like one of the core companies it's not even built by the bank um so we're not really competing with them and on that level at all we don't feel like we really compete with anybody on the software level um we compete with banks on the on the product level but we're you know generally better priced than them to begin with um the uh so i mean that's that's sort of how we you know what we try to build in terms of like thinking about high growth customers and uh and why we go towards them it's actually more that they come towards us uh you know we're open to anybody um but like i would say like we're not the best option if you're a company that's just getting started and you need a basic checking

account tons of people that can do that for you as you start to get bigger and bigger and have more people and more complexity and need an all-in-one solution like that's where we're the best and and that's where we will stand against anybody in the market uh and and win and so um that's sort of how we how we got there it's not we don't have an industry specific vertical we're not like banking for startups or banking for econ or banking for you know like marketing or banking for plumbers like whatever you know there's this big thesis out there that like there's gonna be all these banking for companies uh like i i like i strongly reject that i think it's way too hard to build i think it's really hard to be really excellent at this

and i don't think they're gonna be a thousand companies that are excellent at it yeah and help me understand like if i'm a startup founder you know i start out there's two or three folks on my team uh we start building uh we hit this kind of inflection point we start to scale is it difficult to get folks to kind of transition from whatever their original banking service was to you and kind of how do you think about um you know is a somebody who doesn't appear to be a competitor because they're just so far uh you know in a different part of the market can they basically entrench themselves and make your job harder or how do you kind of convince people to basically um you know abandon the solution they started with and really move to you guys

uh it's like it's one of those things that it's it's actually not as hard as it sounds people like people do build it up they're like ah like switching banks is such a pain like and it's you know it's like if you're big it's like an hour of work and if you're small it's like 20 minutes uh like it's it's really not that bad uh we have a team that is here to actually help them transition. So if companies come to us and they want help moving all their stuff, we'll do it for them. But from... No, I mean, it's a pretty open ecosystem. Banking is in a lot of ways very low tech. And so it's not that bad, but it is like something that people overstate all the time. Got it. How did COVID-19 and the pandemic, the macro environment, all the craziness and

uncertainty and chaos that happened in 2020, how did that affect your business? Did it accelerate? Was there some obstacles? It definitely accelerated. I think in two ways, both in terms of new customer growth and existing customer growth. We saw the companies on our platform, some of which grew 200%, 300% during the crisis because they were high growth companies to begin with. Companies that understood technology, again, whatever vertical you're in, did pretty well through the crisis. And it was generally companies that were slower, attached more to the physical world, bricks and mortar, stuff like that, that unfortunately had a really tough time. So yeah, it definitely helped our companies and our companies have, I think, emerged stronger

in the past year than where they were before. Got it. And then in terms of where you guys go from here, right? What is kind of the product roadmap look like? And how do you kind of see the business evolving? I mean, I don't want to give too much away in terms of product roadmap because I know our competitors watch everything we do these days. Come on. But, you know, look, I mean, we're trying to just continue to make like the CFO's life simpler, the company's life, the employee's life simpler and work better together with money. That's our mission statement. that's our ethos is helping people work better together with money and uh and so we will continue to build product you know where there's this fragmented verticalized ecosystem where cfos

generally have to juggle between seven and ten products like we want to make that ultimately one or two um and so we will just continue to move down that line uh at a measure base uh and try to again just add value to our customers and bring the ecosystem together you know there's a the ben horowitz or uh i'm rick andreessen i forget which one of them uh quote right but that everything is either bundling or rebundling, unbundling or rebundling. We were very much in the rebundling business and believe that the time is now for that.

You know, I think it's all, everything about startups and about, especially about that is about timing. And so, yeah, so we'll keep rebundling. Got it. You mentioned CFOs and it's interesting that you specifically target one person in the executive team of these companies

and you kind of know, hey look, that's the person that we're trying to make their life easier. Talk a little bit about them as customers. What are some of the things that maybe you guys understand that would be surprising to people who don't spend all day thinking about making a CFO's life easier? Are there certain complexities or obstacles that they deal with that were surprising? Or maybe some anecdotes in terms of things that CFOs have said to you in the past that

really kind of seared in your brain and you guys remember? Yeah. I mean, I think for us, our customer is the whole company. like it is you know from the employee the employees all the way up to the ceo but the cfo is really the decision maker and the buyer for us uh and he's the one that's you know that's evaluating all the service providers and choosing row versus others um i think it's i think there's two things that really like that motivate you know that person uh when it comes to this particular space um one is like they understand that like no product is perfect and that like and that having

like a level of support uh and a person behind that is incredibly valuable uh there was a a really dumb banker saying uh that like what i'm when met with this like you know like 50 billion bank in the midwest uh we were like looking for our partner bank they were like yeah cfo's just want one neck to one neck to strangle just like a really off-color odd uh i guess you know old school banking saying i haven't been in the banking world for very long but uh but it's kind of true. They want that person because it's never going to be perfect or they're always going to have questions or there's always edge cases. Banking is always a game of edge case. That's one. Two is every company is a little bit different and being able to allow them to set up their

integrations, the way they run their accounting, the way that they do budgeting, all that stuff. We kind of started out with this is the way it should be and that's kind of like a great ethos from a product management perspective right like don't try to give the customer too many choices uh that's not true in this world you want as much flexibility as possible um because every one of these customers looks a little bit different and we're not going to ask them to change the way that they operate got it and are you able to do anything in terms of once you have a business on as a customer you pretty much have access to you know incredible data you understand who's growing who's not growing uh but really what you have is you've got an ecosystem of customers and

do you guys do anything with um you know kind of putting customers together or leveraging um the growing customer base you have like how do you think about uh the customers in a in a kind of totality um of the actual customer base is there anything there that you guys have done yeah i mean we try to so we'll continue to like productize that more but we try to put our our customers um in specific verticals together with you know the same account representatives um Um, and he's able to connect them all the time and connect them, you know, if he's covering, uh, e-commerce or another one's covering, um, you know, specific areas in venture, uh, being able to connect them with each other, connect with investors like that are also

on our platform. So there's a, you know, similar to like, I guess what, uh, some of the, the more established banks will do, you know, for, for some of their clients, uh, we, we, we embrace that as well. Um, and so that is, you know, that is where we are today. think as we grow yeah like we'll look to add more technology around that uh and ultimately like formalize that but but today it is uh you know it is an incredible collective of like super high growth super interesting companies that are doing they're doing cool stuff um and they generally

want to know each other so we're happy to facilitate that got it makes sense what's been the most surprising thing um you know since you started the business um i think the most surprising thing has been like uh i don't know i guess i mean i guess look i guess the most surprising thing or for me um coming from like a non-tech background um has been just like the the product development cycle um and the fact that like you you know there's truly like no shortcut like it is time times people uh add more people you can do it faster take the same amount of people this are uh but that is it and so you need to make be like really disciplined and parsimonious in terms of your choices, uh, about what you're going to build. Um, thankfully I have like an

amazing product manager as a partner who, you know, has taught me that lesson over and over again. Otherwise I would have, it would have been harder, but, uh, but yeah, that's been like kind of the most, most interesting thing I think for me coming from the other side of the universe. Got it. And then what's been the one thing that maybe you've really said, Hey, you know, we want to accomplish X, but you guys haven't been able to do it yet. Whether it's just, uh, we're not there yet in terms of building the product. Uh, there's some other limitation, maybe even regulation or whatever it is is there something that sticks out in terms of you you guys are almost chasing it but haven't yet done it i mean there has honestly there hasn't been much

like we you know we've always like said i guess what this is the other thing that's been surprising is like that there's kind of nothing that you can't do like we would always start with something like that and then work backwards and find a way to do it whether it's through a partnership or on our own um you know it's just more that you can't do everything all at once uh but i have we haven't found anything that it's like man i wish we could do this thing that jp morgan can do um you know it really is just a function of time um i think for us it's like you know we want to be uh you know we want to be a multi-billion dollar institution we think we'll be there by the end of this year um and that is like what we're chasing uh today got it it makes a ton of sense

uh bitcoin crypto blockchain kind of this whole decentralized digital world uh is now getting tons and tons of attention um you guys being in financial services is you know somewhat tangentially related how do you think about that space and are you guys doing anything there or yeah you know will you do something in the future yeah i mean we started out building uh building a lot of like a lot of decentralized tech uh on our ledger we ended up like using parts of it but not not all of it um and went more a more traditional approach at the beginning but it's definitely something with myself and my co-founder, we're super enmeshed in at the start. In terms of the space, we're always looking at DeFi and is there an opportunity to be able to bring our customers

into that? I would say there's still fundamental challenges that make that tough at the moment. But we expect that that will change as you have more of an ecosystem and you can basically borrow from those markets in a USD. Like you can't kind of, you know, you have an asset liability mismatch if you're borrowing crypto and your liabilities are in dollars. In terms of other stuff, you know, in terms of Bitcoin, like, yeah, I mean, I was, you know, I was a macro analyst in BM for a long time. And I was always, the smarter guys that I worked for would always tell me to like focus on the supply side of any market, because it's the most predictable, whether you're looking at oil, whether you're looking at stocks, whether you're looking... You can actually solve backwards from

supply and that will generally give you a pretty good indication of where market's going to go. So in a lot of ways, crypto and Bitcoin is the perfect market. It's the perfect... Because you do have a fundamentally locked supply that's going to decline. I remember looking at it and I feel dumb for not buying more of it. In 2011 or 2013, And I was like, uh, I was like, this is like the perfect bubble in a lot of ways, because it is like, literally I couldn't, you couldn't construct something that, that would, uh, that would, you know, that would like, this is exactly what we've looked for. Basically. This is exactly what I would look for as an analyst in a market. Like where's the market where supply

is going down and where there's like, you know, uh, there's inherent demand that's, that's growing. And it's like really that simple. So I think it's, um, you know, the market it's super volatile. it'll move every day and you know it might go up or down 30 you know but uh but like it has you know the right characteristics absolutely and it's pretty incredible i think that um it is that simple right it's just from a market structure standpoint like the supply goes down down down and there's a caps overall supply and then you get a increasing demand and like if you took an economics 101 course you know what happens next right and it's all like it's not rocket science um it's pretty simple i mean the other thing is like markets are made at the

margin, right? So it doesn't take that much buying to move it. Like, I think, you know, yes, it's a, I don't know what it is right now, trillion dollar market cap or whatever it is, but, you know, how much is actually moving every day and settling at the end of the day, not just like trading intraday. It's not just like any market. It doesn't take that much to move out. Absolutely. Talk a little bit about kind of the decentralized finance movement, right? So, you know, whether it's being built on Bitcoin or Ethereum or wherever, just this idea of like, let's build these decentralized applications that replace a lot of the same financial service or banking functions.

Have you guys looked at that or kind of what your thoughts there? Yeah. I mean, we've looked at it. I think, you know, I think there's a really bright future there. Again, I think our perspective on the space was that the ecosystem was like that. The challenge is really building an audience. It is really building like, you know, a community of businesses and, and providing value. And I think that fundamentally as a borrower, which most of our businesses would be in this instance,

um you know they they shouldn't really care uh is it you know like they just they need to be able to grow their business that's what they care about they're not they're not there to make you know bets on crypto they're not there to like um to to do sort of stuff in defy they just want a better product um and so our our perspective has always been like if it gives our customer a lower cost of interest if it gives our customer a better borrowing experience uh you know we will embrace it. I would say today, it's still far off, but it's moving very fast to the point where I think that there's a real opportunity there. And so much of credit and of finances is so manual and is so old school that I'm really excited about a lot of the developments in that space

because I think that they will accelerate the adoption of credit for a lot of these customers. Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense. What's the one big thing that you guys are looking forward to in 2021? You mentioned trying to accomplish a multi-billion dollar institutional valuation or milestone, but what's the big thing that gets you guys there? Yeah. Multi-billion in terms of the assets of our clients on our platform, and I think we'll be there pretty fast. What gets us there is just continuing to put our heads down and execute. honestly i mean we spent two years uh you know with like really no product uh sorry with no market uh focusing on product uh before we launched um you know we think very firmly the best product in the

market wins uh we've done like basically no marketing like we really are you know focused on learning from our customers growing around them uh and building out that way so um you know there's a lot of other people that are you know doing a lot of hand waving and putting billboards everywhere whatever we're not about that like we're really just trying to focus and win Got it. We didn't talk about the name. Where did Ro come from? So Ro is like the DVO one of an option, right? It's like, if interest rates go up by X percent, what is my option worth? And it was kind of a metaphor for how we try to help our customers, right? It's like, we're going to improve your trajectory a little bit, not a ton,

that's up to you, but enough. And so that's sort of where it came from. I love that. In terms of the fintech space in general, it seems like everyone is spacking, going public, raising monster rounds, like just the interest from the public markets and large late stage growth investors is off the charts. Is that something that's kind of a bubble or frothy and like, yeah, there's a point in time where this all is fun and games, but like it's getting out of hand or do you guys feel like uh no you know investors have it right and uh kind of digital you know businesses that focus on the finance industry are really just getting started and i'm cheating because asking somebody who's building a company in the space is uh

uh probably a little biased but i mean i am uh for sure i'm a little biased because i made that you know this is the bet that i made with with my career uh i had the same conversation two years ago uh with my with our investors they're like ah this is a bubble you know so you know valuation should be here blah blah blah uh and i was like no it's it's a new asset class it's not a bubble like venture you know at the time was 500 million 500 billion dollars versus like p which was like 2 billion now it's like a billion versus 2 billion uh but uh i absolutely sorry trillion versus 2 trillion uh i absolutely uh don't think it's a bubble um i think that there's two things that happening one uh interest rates are zero right real rates are negative that means future value

equals present value for all intents and purposes so find something that's going to grow like it should be worth a lot today even if they're not making that much money today uh if interest rates go back up which is like a very big if uh like that will change a bit but like that is appropriately priced for where we are today in the cycle and investors should understand that uh i think the second thing is that it has never been possible in history, at least as far as I know, to build companies from the ground up that can compete with $50 billion, $100 billion companies that exist in public markets today. And as an investor, would I rather put a billion dollars into Stripe or whatever the new Stripe is, or like T-SYS or one of these like WorldPay or someone like that,

right like i would much i i can i can guarantee you it's gonna be more valuable in an earlier stage company uh that can replicate you know what is what exists today in public markets then what exists public markets and private markets are only about six percent of public markets overall right if you think about total market cap globally so no i think it's a new reality and i think that it is like uh you know comparisons to the previous bubble are pretty misplaced um it's a new asset class. Yeah. I tend to agree with you. And I think also the thing that people are underestimating and maybe, you know, kind of just completely missing is the global nature of this and also just how much more efficient, how much more profitable, how much more scalable

the digital versions are, right? Or kind of these like new age technologies. And some of it's literally like you're a digital business and the competitor you have as a digital business, but you're using technologies that are far superior and therefore more scalable, more efficient, kind of more valuable to the customer. And in some cases, literally you're going up against a bank that sells a fax machine. It really is all over the place, but it seems like you guys really have an advantage from the position you're coming from. Yeah. I mean, I just think that there's so much, there's opportunity everywhere, not just in the space we're doing and consumer and all over FinTech. I don't think the top five banks have been the top five banks for the

past 30 years literally um i think the next 20 years like that will not be the case like it will be someone like us someone like chime um that will be that will be up there yeah i love that uh before i finish up i always ask everyone the same three questions and you'll get to ask me one to finish up uh the first one is more serious what's the most important book that you've ever read uh that's a good question uh i think the most impactful book i ever read was a book called the inner game of tennis. So it was written in, I think like 1979 or something like that. And it was, uh, but it's about a, about a hundred page book. It's pretty short. Um, and it's really about like embracing a performance mindset. Um, I re I was given to me when I like started, uh,

trading, uh, uh, from another PM and, uh, it was, uh, it's a great book. It's, it's a great book for no matter what you're doing, but especially if you're in a performance driven job, um, where really have to you know learn how to like focus on your uh on on your insights and instincts uh and sort of quiet it's quiet like the uh sort of part of your mind that is that is fighting that uh because that's where like you know if you're playing tennis okay like you just you just have to go flow and but if you're doing anything else right if you're running a portfolio like you have insights that other people don't see and those are hard to kind of get at like your brain is constantly telling you you know no like and you have to unlock that a little bit

or if you're building a company and same thing like so i thought that was a really good one i've read it about four times i should probably read it again uh but uh but yeah i love that uh i've never heard that book so i'll definitely check it out uh next one's a little bit more personal uh and this is a question sponsored by eight sleep which has got this uh kind of cooled mattress uh mateo the ceo got on me and said hey man you gotta start sleeping more use this thing uh and all of a sudden now i feel like i'm sleeping on an ice block but uh i get deeper rem sleep uh and it pretty much changed the way that uh i feel during the day how do you sleep are you a four or five hour person are you a 10 hour person what's kind of your sleep routine

i uh i have a two-year-old daughter so my sleep routine has changed a lot in the past couple years uh i'm uh let's see i i'm basically my sleep revolves around her uh basically so when she she goes to bed i try to go to bed and then she wakes up earlier than me and it's like hitting me on the head you know whatever 6 a.m i uh uh i recently started asking this question and so i don't have a ton of data points but uh every single person with a kid under the age of three years old make sure that that is a known part of the the change in the sleep routine so it's a big change the young child is uh is now the boss it seems like totally absolutely uh and then uh my final question before you could ask me one is more fun which is aliens are you a believer or a non-believer

can i be in the middle like i i wouldn't i think there's like a decent chance uh but i you know it's not a belief or non-belief thing it's a probability i think it's a non-zero probability okay and uh if you're in the middle i'm gonna assume you're similar to me of like yes there it's highly probable that just given how big the universe is uh it you know there's some form of intelligent life but they're not little green men that visited earth type thing right yeah yeah i think that's right the universe is pretty big uh so there's probably some something out there most likely mathematically but uh you know they probably haven't been here you probably haven't been there but i don't know there's a lot yeah you gotta ask smarter people that that one

that's uh that's over my pay grade there's a guy in the i think he's from israel he was like uh in charge of you know extraterrestrial search in israel or whatever and uh now he's come out he's older and he's claiming that there's like a galactic federation and uh all the planets are all part of it i was like really i was like you might have stared in uh telescopes for too long or something i mean yeah i don't know i don't know you gotta get elon musk on the show and ask asking that absolutely uh you could ask me one question to finish up what do you got for me all right well what do you think i mean look uh you know it's been a crazy world for for crypto uh like are we you know are we overhyped at this point is this the beginning of

of you know the next the next wave uh uh you know where do you think how do you think we we shape out here yeah so i think that um i have three separate thoughts that are all related one is uh we are at the start of what i'll call it the institutional bull market so kind of last two or three bull markets have really been retail driven this is the first institutional bull market so it's got room to run from like a price standpoint how high it goes how long it lasts you know that again people much smarter than me will figure that out but just like hey the institutions are now here they're buying bitcoin they're starting to look at the space like they're taking this much more seriously than they ever have and i think that only gets more pervasive and more

significant over time um two is uh everyone is probably drastically underestimating how important and big uh just this general move is so i you know i basically think of it in two different frameworks so one is like the digital version of all of these businesses is going to be way bigger than the current iteration and if you really think like i think a lot of people compare digital to analog i always talk about there's almost this like middle step where it was like analog that went to really electronic like with electronic q-sips and so there were some you know computer enabled tight transactions but if you look at like the technology you're using versus some of these legacy banks like you guys are really digital those banks are more kind of electronic abusive

and so it's better than analog but like there was still some bureaucracy and and some pain points and middlemen and all that that you guys are removing so i think that like digital will be bigger than kind of electronic for analog the other thing is that i think that the decentralized protocols will be bigger than their centralized counterparts some of that will be like protocol versus companies some of that will just be decentralized protocol for centralized product whatever it ends up being um i think it's a ways out like maybe you know we're like five years away from that but really being uh you know kind of pervasive uh and so if you really start to look at that as like okay i want to be in digital finance and i eventually want to be in digital

decentralized finance bitcoin's probably the only thing that really kind of hits that spot right now it's had this incredible fun um but like when you look at how big is that market like most people are talking about like you know does bitcoin go to 100k i'm thinking like bitcoin's 100 trillion dollar market cap at some point in the future and again i don't know if that's 50 years from now right or 20 right but it's not tomorrow right you know what i mean like it's pretty far away and so then you get into this world of like well okay if that's just like the core unit of account well then like what's all the other value that gets created like the decentralized infrastructure decentralized lending like all that's going to happen um it's just hard to tell like who builds

it and how long it takes and then the last thing i think is uh it's not a straight line so you kind of have like yes we're an institutional bull market two we're all underestimating how big this is going to be but three is like you know put your seat belt on because this is going to be super volatile along the way right i mean you know you kind of look at the business you guys have built there's days where you probably feel euphoric and it's like we're gonna you know be the next uh top five bank and then there's days where you're like oh my god like you know the house is on fire right and sometimes that may happen in the morning and afternoon in the same day just given like you know the challenges of building a food so i think that uh people just

have to remember like you know there's gonna be price corrections along the way there's gonna be protocols that you know uh fail and kind of all of that type of stuff and so it's you can be bullish on a really long time horizon but also be you know somewhat patient in the short to medium term and understand like all great things just take time to build so i think yeah how i look at it doesn't necessarily give us answers like where people should go put their money but i think it's a framework that kind of you know rationally explains like where we go uh that's awesome that is uh thank you yeah absolutely uh where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about rowe yeah uh so you can come see us at rowe r-h-o dot co um and uh and

And if you're a company or you see CFO or, um, just want to learn more, you can book an appointment with, with one of our team members. Um, and, uh, you can find me on Twitter at, uh, Everett cook and why, uh, I'm not very active though. Uh, we're also at row business banking. Uh, sorry, row business on Twitter. We got to get you on Twitter and, uh, in Sweden, man. I've been following you for a while, actually. I, uh, you know, I, yeah. I'm, uh, I'm expecting now for you to just start with a couple of hot takes

after we do this podcast. All right, you got it. You can retweet if I say anything smart. Yeah, I'll retweet it. It'll be my two-year-old keeps me awake at night. And you'll be the most popular guy. That's right. Because everyone will agree.

Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much, everyone. I really appreciate this. And I think that people will, one, have learned a lot, but also, two, I think you just sitting at a really interesting intersection between a bunch of different disciplines and obviously the business you guys pull is fantastic.

So I suggest people go check it out, roe.co or go find him on Twitter. Awesome.