He took on Robinhood & built Public.com into a $1B company with $440M raised. | Jannick Malling, Founder of Public.com

Public co-founder Jannick Malling shares exactly how he grew his startup from a tiny beta to millions of users—and hundreds of millions raised. He reveals why fractional shares changed the game for user acquisition, how the company cleverly seized on the GameStop moment to explode growth, and why relentless product focus was critical to scaling quickly. 

He explains the mindset shift needed to nail product-market fit multiple times and why you should only tackle timeless problems if you want your startup to last.

Why You Should Listen

• Learn how Public went from 1K beta users to millions in just 18 months by flipping the playbook.

• Discover how to capture viral growth moments like GameStop and turning them into sustained growth.

• Understand how intense product focus can drive massive results even with limited resources.

• Hear why you need to solve timeless problems, not trendy ones.

Keywords

startup growth, product market fit, fractional shares, viral growth, Public investing app, fintech startup, user acquisition, scaling startups, startup advice, founder interview

(00:00:00) How Public Went from 1K Users to Millions

(00:09:41) Jannick’s Path from Teen Designer to Fintech Founder

(00:19:03) Fractional Shares Unlock Explosive Growth

(00:26:31) Why Community was Key (and How it Actually Worked)

(00:31:36) Launch Day Metrics Go Off the Charts

(00:35:38) Unusual Strategy Behind Public’s Word-of-Mouth Success

(00:42:38) How Public Increased Average Deposits by 30x

(00:49:12) How GameStop Doubled Public’s User Base in 48 Hours

(00:53:00) Jannick’s Real Advice on Picking Problems That Matter

Chapters

• 0:00 How Public Went from 1K Users to Millions
• 9:42 Jannick’s Path from Teen Designer to Fintech Founder
• 19:05 Fractional Shares Unlock Explosive Growth
• 26:31 Why Community was Key (and How it Actually Worked)
• 31:36 Launch Day Metrics Go Off the Charts
• 35:38 Unusual Strategy Behind Public’s Word-of-Mouth Success
• 42:38 How Public Increased Average Deposits by 30x
• 49:12 How GameStop Doubled Public’s User Base in 48 Hours
• 53:00 Jannick’s Real Advice on Picking Problems That Matter

Transcript

Jannick Malling (00:00:00):
But focus, discipline and consistency over some period of time. I would argue that still, it's one of the most rare things. And if people can really stick with that, I mean, talk to any YouTuber and they'll tell you how they got their channel up is exactly by focus, consistency and discipline over a prolonged period of time. Focus is not because we have a bunch of ideas and we don't think they're not worth doing. They might be phenomenal ideas, but we're deciding to sacrifice those ideas. Because we focus on this other thing. That's focus, like literally having great ideas you're very excited about, not doing them because you're focused on something else. And our first LP was Lehman Brothers.

Pablo Srugo (00:00:41):
Oh, wow. Okay.

Jannick Malling (00:00:42):
Well, which we never saw the money, but they signed. GameStop was a step change, right? So it was all around there. So yeah, GameStop was like, we doubled in 48 hours or something.

Previous Guests (00:00:53):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:06):
Do you think the Product Market Fit Show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:19):
Jannick, welcome to the show, man.

Jannick Malling (00:01:21):
Thanks, man. Good to be here.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:22):
Dude, so it's been a pretty impressive journey. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars raised now. What do you have, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of users? Like, where are you at today? Give me maybe just a little.

Jannick Malling (00:01:32):
In the millions.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:33):
And you launched, what, like five years ago now? So it's been a pretty crazy journey.

Jannick Malling (00:01:39):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, been a wild ride.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:42):
So maybe, I mean, let's go back to the beginning, as we always do. Like, tell me a little bit about maybe just like your background and kind of where even the idea, because what you've built? Well, actually, let me ask you this before I did. Like, is it fair to say it's like a Robinhood competitor? Or is that an unfair kind of characterization of what Public is?

Jannick Malling (00:02:02):
I mean, I think there are many better characterizations, but yeah, we are competing with Robinhood. I do think, though, as the years have gone on, we've become a little bit less competitive. I think we focus a little bit more. Sort of higher end of the market people that want to take investing a little bit more seriously. I think we've built out a platform and a product suite. That is a little bit more fully featured, I would say, wider, things like, you know, having bonds available on the platform, for anyone who's kind of serious about building a real multi-decade kind of tried-and-true portfolio. I think they're more interested in bonds than in betting, which is a little bit like our two last. Our two last product launches last year, or our two biggest product launches in 2024. So I think there was a natural crossroads, but like in the early days, as you know, new kind of markets and stuff, it's always a little bit more tricky to sort of divide up the battlefield and kind of figure that out now. But I think now we, many say, that we're a little bit more premium kind of version of them. And there are a lot of others that say that we're just a little bit more like a digital-first Schwab or Fidelity. which are obviously very, very old companies. So I think right now, you know, probably we're somewhere at that range. That's at least how most of our members today sort of read it back to us.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:24):
So then take us back to wherever that was, like 2017, 2018, before this what was your background? Where were you, and how do you come up with the idea for Public?

Jannick Malling (00:03:32):
So way before that, I actually. I'm one of these weird guys who. I'm 37 and I have 20 years of experience in the space. And so people look at me when I say that and they're like, no, that doesn't add up.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:43)
Something doesn't add up. That's right.

Jannick Malling (00:03:45):
Now you're hallucinating. But yeah, I actually started at company called Saxo Bank when I was 17 years old, which is like the European trade. So I got a really early start in this whole industry. Really, the only reason they hired me was because I could design and code. And so pre-squarespace and VIX and all that stuff, being able to just like do any kind of code was obviously a great skill set to have. Was a few years there, rocket ship of a company, one of the fastest growing companies in Europe at the time, sort of like the pioneer of online trading in Europe, if you will. And today’s seen as a little bit like the interactive province of Europe. I think most people in America kind of see it that way. Left in 2008 with a couple of others from Saxo to start another business more on the B2B side, more like API trading.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:30):
What a time to start a business, man.

Jannick Malling (00:04:32):
Dude, I know. Actually, funny story, a lot of what the first product was about was bridging sort of liquidity from the interbank market to small and medium-sized financial institutions around Europe and the Middle East. And our first LP was Lehman Brothers.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:45):
Oh, wow. Okay.

Jannick Malling (00:04:46):
Well, which we never saw the money. But they signed, and we got regulated by the UK Financial Services Authority. This business was primarily in London. And yeah, so that got off to a wild ride. But eight years later, we'd scale that to a multi-billion-a-day volume platform. Sold it to a publicly traded company in the UK.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:08):
What did that platform do specifically?

Jannick Malling (00:05:09):
So it ended up doing a bunch of different things, but facilitating sort of interbank credit into the sort of SME marketplace was pretty key, especially after 2008. So this is one of those stories where we actually had a totally different idea, but then 08 happened and the credit markets just dried up, and we just saw this opportunity to basically take a credit line essentially and sort of multiplex it out as a way to. So if you're a small regional broker in France or Eastern Europe somewhere, instead of putting up $20, $30 million dollars a collateral with a big bank, you'd give us maybe one or two, and we would sort of aggregate that across multiple smaller brokerages so that they could continue to conduct business with the banks and, you know, offset their flow and stuff. That was the first business. And then, you know, as it happens in many businesses, you got to find product market fit a couple of times over if you want to be successful. So we had another business that I more directly ran, which was like an API trading business called Tradeable, which was like early in the whole sort of app store based kind of trading platform approach and API trading. Today, you see a bunch of players on this page, which is kind of funny. So I think we were probably a little bit ahead of our time.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:14):
What year is this?

Jannick Malling (00:06:15):
This was 2012 now. Okay. Yeah, so a long time ago at this point. And there was another business. Which was more like risk management, kind of SaaS tools and stuff like that. So all sold badly in 2016. I was in London. Brexit hit. I was like, Screw this. I'm going to go stateside. That's sort of like the major leagues for finance anyway, especially after Brexit. It will be. So I went to America in 2016/2017. And I think, really got back to my design roots. So I've always, like I said, been a designer since those early days. But during that other company, I was a little bit more of a CEO sales type guy with 250 travel days a year on a plane doing B2B sales. And then I really kind of lost touch with a lot of my product sense and my design sense. So I actually took a year where I just wanted to sharpen my skills. Obviously, I've made a little bit of money, so it took a little bit of the pressure off too. And so I could just reach out to companies that I like and ask, hey, do you want some advice on design? And it was like, little did they know, it was like very hands-on design. Like I'd just go into, and the tools were changing and everything. And I really think this is one of the best decisions I've made in my career because I spent four to six months just really deep every day designing, animating, like deep in those design communities again. And then, you know, a couple of the folks that I worked with won a bunch of these Apple App of the Week awards, Webby awards, like different things like that. And then I realized, okay, And probably, you know, I've sharpened my skills right now, and I'm kind of ready to do the next thing. But that was incredibly important for me to do. I think my life would have had an entirely different trajectory had I not done that.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:52):
It's not a normal thing either, like to go back and kind of hone your craft. I mean, normally you try and do something bigger. I can even imagine, at that time, you asking companies and they're like, really, like you want to? Like you want to design like products, man?

Jannick Malling (00:08:05):
It's kind of weird, right? I didn't. But to tell the truth, I didn't do it as a career move. Like, I know you listen to a lot of podcasts, and you hear people talking about like the best thing you can do for your career is like sharpen your skill set. I obviously fully agree with that, but I didn't do it for career purposes. I did it because I missed it. I fucking love designing. I missed being in that. I missed, I mean, for me, the real design is about problem solving, but obviously it's also about ending up with something beautifully simple and sophisticated at the end of a problem, of a really messy problem. So I just absolutely love that journey. And, you know, it's one of the things that really can get me in like a flow state, which is where you feel the most alive. And so I just missed it. And that's kind of why I did it. And the good thing was it, ultimately, I guess, obviously benefited me a lot with Public because once I started seeing some of the problems that I learned to live in to Public, you know, it was very quick for me to just, you know, talk to customers and go straight into, like, designing pixels, like literally like sort of like playing back your recording of customer sessions while you're in Figma, like literally like a very real-time process like that. And then with an engineer eventually on my side, actually kind of coding it up. And then before you know it, you're sort of off to the races. So I think it is really phenomenal advice for all the people that give the advice. But the truth is I never heard that advice. I just did it because I missed it.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:28):
Which is maybe the best reason to do something just because you're feeling it. And so then, where in that time does the idea for Public kind of come in? And what is the first even idea of what you want to build?

Jannick Malling (00:09:41):
Yeah, so we were a little bit of an odd case because normally you hear a very direct problem, solution, and a bunch of iteration. I think we started with the worldview of, you know, the US stock market is the greatest kind of wealth builder of all time. And so why isn't every single individual on the planet, or at least the country, taking advantage of it, right? As somebody that had just come from Europe, I had always been very envious that I had no access to this. But then you go too. I moved to New York, and I realized that like 8 out of 10 people my age really don't take advantage of it. And they actually saw the stock market as being this like gambling, testosterone pump kind of trade-off thing. And it can be that, but it also can be, just like I said, the greatest most, simplest way to build your wealth of all time. Compounding at 10% a year on average for the last 100 years. And so in a lot of those customer interviews, when I started going outside of my immediate circles, which I think is always important to do because amongst friends and people who know you and stuff, you never really know if you actually have a hundred percent clear answer. So once you go kind of through the circles and you just see a lot of consistency in the response, I think that's always a great signal as far as whether you really have a problem that is meaningful and people care deeply about. And that's important.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:55):
What were you hearing? What was the consistent thing you were hearing in those customer interviews?

Jannick Malling (00:10:59):
Well, like I said, I mean, look, I was talking to Stanford-educated product managers working at big tech firms who were literally saying like, yeah, you know, for me, it's always seemed too scary and too risky. And I don't really know. And like, I probably need to save out. Like some people would be like, yeah, like I'm saving up still, like when I clear like $100K in cash before I get this like this.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:20):
They were just holding cash. Wow.

Jannick Malling (00:11:22):
During Zerp.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:23):
Wow.

Jannick Malling (00:11:24):
During the zero interest rate period. Waiting to hit some magic number in their mind, $50K, $100K, before they start investing. which made absolutely no sense. Whenever I'd mention ETFs, some people would be like, oh yeah, like that's what caused the financial crisis, right? Like these three little acronyms that the finance world are using are just like, fucking terrible.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:43):
They're all bad. They're all bad.

Jannick Malling (00:11:43):
I don't know why we keep coming back to them. But seriously, right? And I honestly think a big reason I saw an interview with Michael Douglas once who said that Wall Street was one of the best movies that he's ever done that he regrets the most or something like that, or maybe doesn't outright regret, but it was just like all the scams that you know. The insider trading stuff that got idolized basically through that movie. I think, Leo, with The Wall Street, like, I think you see a lot of this. All these movies are just fantastic, which is fun, but it's also kind of shitty for the sort of like societal adoption of this stuff because it portrays the stock market as just being this like scandalous thing. And like I said, it can be that, but it can also be something entirely different. And so it dawned upon me that people saw it more as the former than the latter. So that was kind of step one, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:12:32):
And you're. Just one more question around this. Like you're doing these customer interviews because you already think to yourself, I want to start a company inside of fintech. I just don't know what, or like what even leads you into these? Because typically you kind of say, I want to do this thing. And then you customer interviews it to see if it's right. But you're almost doing like discovery. What was kind of your frame of mind at that point?

Jannick Malling (00:12:51):
You know what I mean? I mean, I guess FinTech was in the cards for me, given that I had kind of worked in that space. I mean, I think my old company, London Trader, was one of the early firms to like around the coining of the term FinTech. So I was basically in that space before the term was even coined. And at this point, it was kind of starting to hit a great trajectory. And so, yeah, I guess that was in the cards for me. But really, I was doing it out of just the curiosity of why, as somebody who was very financially literate and had seen, I mean, been on a trading floor for many years and seen stuff but was still only 28 years old. I was like, why are people, or like 29, 30, like late 20s, like why are people like not taking advantage of this? And so, but it was really diving into that. And what I found later, which is interesting, is like, that was maybe less the problem. It was more kind, of the symptom. All these things people were telling me, with $100K they need to save up and sort of not knowing what to invest in. How to design a strategy, and this, that, and the other. The problem actually, and this is where I think we differ a little bit off of the regular path, is we ended up having like a multi-problem scenario with like multiple solutions actually in order to really find product market fit. So two things came mostly out of that. One was this idea of community and social sort of investing, whereas like a lot of people would have a hard time trusting a financial advisor, especially after 08, still being only sort of eight/nine years old at the time. People remember growing up with that. But they trust the friends. Not all the friends, but like very specific sorts of parts of their circles, maybe family. So out of this idea came sort of social and being more open and transparent with what you own and why and trying to build a social graph into a stock brokerage. So that was one idea that we then actually initially sort of executed on. But then the second idea was back to this thing of people saying, I need to save $100,000 or maybe $50. And when you double-click on that, you realize that people, some people, knew the kind of companies they wanted to own. And if they didn't, the social actually did really help with that from like a discovery aspect. But then they were like, How do I build my portfolio here? And Warren Buffett always said two things, diversify and optimize your taxes. That's it. Anybody can make money in the markets. And that's true. If you're a long-term investor, you diversify. But diversification is actually easier said than done. Because this was pre-fractional shares, which then obviously became the solution here, but where Google was $3,000 shares, Amazon $2,000 shares, or was it the opposite? I don't know. But like a lot of these big companies that people wanted to own that they saw upside in, it was multi-thousand dollar incremental purposes. So that means that if you start with over $10,000, Amazon could be 30%, 60%, or 90% of your portfolio. Couldn't be 40%, couldn't be 10%, couldn't be 80%, right? And so it was hard to control the diversification of your portfolio, and it was hard to really diversify. I mean, buying the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the time would cost you $15,000. So that's why people got to this thing of like, yeah, I need to save up money and then make the big leap. And that's where we realized, but wait a minute. So what if you could actually buy just a dollar of a share, right? And we'd seen the rise of Bitcoin being very popular in part because you didn't need to buy a whole coin to participate in that thing, right? And then we tried to sort of retrofit the stock market into that kind of structure, which took a lot of regulatory innovation, took a lot of technical kind of innovation. But ultimately, we found that there was obviously a way to own a fraction of a share, because obviously, if you were owning two different public companies and they merged, you could end up with a fraction of a share. But the way that you report that to the regulators, the way that's handled in trading systems, was always like the exception, not the rule. So typically the experience is if a corporate action merger happens and you end up with like a fraction of a share, you typically like have to call your broker to like sell a little bit to like round it up or down or whatever, right? It's like one of these corner-case experiences that nobody ever built any experience around. Because they saw it as almost like an error, like something that happened to you. We flipped the model on its head. It's like, what if that actually, what if we build enough automation around that becomes the default? Then you could have a UI where it's a dramatically similar UI because you just hit a stock, it's a dollar amount, you're done. You don't have to do the math of like this many shares and this and that and the other. And again, that sort of is where the design thinking was very helpful because what you're able to, then very quickly go from hearing that problem, building that screen, putting a prototype in front of people, and A/B testing, okay, what's better? The classic sort of like number of shares and doing all the math and blah, blah, blah, or just putting in dollar amounts. If you had to build a portfolio in a row, how would you do it? And we saw that people much more quickly were able to build a portfolio because they could start with $100; $1,000, still get exposure to dozens and dozens of companies. 20, 30, 40 companies, build a really well-developed portfolio, and then keep dollar cost averaging into it, which is another one of these sort of, I think, holy grail sort of sound investing principles that have been proven over time as being what most people should probably do. And that actually meant in turn that people were speculating less because I think on platforms like Robinhood and others, you were kind of seeing some people getting into a lot of single, high-concentration risk portfolios, maybe some penny stock trading options, stuff like that. And that's a little bit where I think we were able to break out and build the market in a different direction.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:38):
And Jannick , when you started looking at this kind of fractional idea, what was the landscape like? Because I know, like, for example, so, my firm, this is before I joined, but we did a company in 2013 called, like, Stockpile, which was all around this idea of fractional shares. They actually, you know, didn't end up working out. But there are others that have, I guess, tried to do this. I don't know if you know them specifically, but just in general, what was kind of the landscape?

Jannick Malling (00:19:00):
Yeah, Stockpile, that was more the gifting thing, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:19:03):
Yeah, it was like you could give $5 in Netflix stock.

Jannick Malling (00:19:04):
Again, a bunch of people had tried the fractional thing, but it had never been done in a real-time trading platform. So it had been done as like, I sent you a gift certificate and this, that, and the other, but none of that really worked because at the end of the day, I just don't think people want to build a portfolio, and then like, 9 a.m. the next morning, all the trades go through. Like that doesn't really, like if you're doing it during market open and stuff, like it doesn't really. It didn't really resonate with people that that's how you do it. Like a lot of people, like the feedback look of like, I'm building my portfolio right now. I've carved out time to do this now. I'm going to get it done. Right. It became much less cumbersome that way, I think, for people too. And, and much less sort of, it seemed like a lot less work, quite frankly, to just start building your portfolio. Right. And so, almost like a Nike slogan, Just do it became a thing, right? It's like, just start. You can just start today. And that took people out of a mindset of like, oh, I need to wait, and I need to educate myself much more. I need to save up a lot of money. It's like, you can do that, but you should just start today. With a hundred bucks, you can build a portfolio in the next 10 minutes. And you could be done in the market, you're an owner, you go from zero to one. And then from there, it's just about going from 1 to 100. And that's where the whole community, with like a lot of discovery happening and a lot of people helping and coming together about researching companies, was very important. So you didn't have to do all that research yourself all the time. I think very recently we've seen that much more move to AI, which I think is super interesting going back to this idea of having to find product market fit multiple times in the journey of a company, typically around the same evergreen problems, but there can be a different solution to that problem that emerges over time with different technologies and such. Like I said, I think we're seeing that play out in AI as we speak. And so we were the first to actually do that real-time thing that didn't exist before. That is really what kind of clicked with people. That's when you start to see, you know, daily active usage that was like 60%, 70% on the down-mile ratio basis, right? And super, super high retention, super high engagement, which you didn't really have with like the, if you gift somebody stock on Stockpile or whatever, it's like, doesn't really come a lot the same way. By the way, last thing, I also think there was a good multiplier, obviously, with it because we were running a beta with the social stuff without the fractional stuff because social was easy enough to build, but fractional was very hard to build, right? But social platforms are a thing. People know how to build them. It's not necessarily that difficult. Fractional was like a brand new thing that we had to, like, figure out how to do in a way that we wanted to do it. And so social stuff was like not really working, to be honest, because people like, yeah, the discovery is nice, but like somebody just bought, you know, shares in this company or put 2% of their portfolio in this company. I can't do that because the math doesn't add up to me. That's where Fractional completely opened up, and everybody could actually, like, sort of copy each other if they wanted. Everybody could like be inspired by other people and take action on that in a much more direct fashion.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:10):
And then, you know, one more question, and then we're actually going to. I want to get into that storyline of how you launched that beta and then added Fractional, how that all played out. But just in terms of like human psychology, I mean, you mentioned diversification, and, you know, I would argue, you could argue that like, oh, if you want diversification, just buy an ETF, like buy the S&P 500, buy the QQQ. Like, you know, even if you want something, like, there's so many ETFs these days. Pick what you want and then buy that ETF and diversify that way. Like, what is it about human psychology that makes something like Fractional so much more interesting to so many people than just diversifying through ETFs?

Jannick Malling (00:22:43):
I think there are multiple layers to that question. But the first thing, I think. Yes, you can just buy an ETF and leave it there and never look at it again. You'll also not learn anything. And I think learning by doing is really what defines our generation. Maybe what defines the next generation would be learning by prompting, but learning by doing has been the thing for our generation and why we have been able to have much more career growth much earlier than sort of our parents baby boomer kind of generations, etc. And I think ultimately, you know, there's always a difference between, like, there's the intrinsic motivations of folks, and then there's what they tell you. Right, so like, if I interview. I always tell the product team this, like if I interview a customer, if I just assume that they're just a Public just to grow their portfolio, like sometimes that's the case, but a lot of times there are other things they want to achieve. They might not even realize it themselves necessarily fully. It might be like a little bit of subconscious being sometimes, but like, you're also there to learn. You're there to take control of your own finances. You're there to get into a position where, I mean, investing is a forcing function for building a lot of financial literacy. You start to understand politics. You start actually to become a little bit more objective about politics, in my opinion, because you're looking at it purely from a lens of like, how does it affect the economy and stuff, which is less about, you know, like.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:10):
It's less emotional in a sense.

Jannick Malling (00:24:11):
Like the pronoun issue in politics has nothing to do with the stock market, but like the debt ceiling, like all these things. So you start to understand the intricacies of all that much more. Honestly, we've had so many people who understand the mortgage. The credit card bills are better just because they started investing. So I think you level yourself up. And I think as much as everybody wants to get rich, I think one of the biggest drivers of happiness is self-fulfillment and levelling yourself up in life and self-realization, self-actualization. And that just doesn't come if you drop $10K into an ETF and never look at it again. And so I think that's the reason why there will always be a big space for kind of self-directed. And then I think you can get into more tactical things like, hey, if you buy the NASDAQ 100, which is widely marketed as the NASDAQ Tech 100, you probably think you get a lot of exposure to tech companies. You do, but also the 10th biggest company is Costco. And that's not false advertising for some reason, but I didn't sign up for that when I bought QQQ or whatever. It's like that I'm getting, and because I'm seeing QQQ, it's like, yeah, that's the tech thing, but then I'm buying Costco. And I'm not buying a bunch of other tech companies, by the way, that probably should. So I think at the end of the day, ETFs also, I think, are starting to have some problems. A lot of people are talking about right now the fact that they might be because they're sort of market cap based, you know. Maybe they should be rebalanced. There should be limits, et cetera. And I'm not going to take a position on that. This is all just to say that those are among the plethora of reasons why people choose self-directed over just going into retail.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:55):
I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact. It's not even, now that I think about it. It's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you; do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. Super helpful. So let's go back into the storyline. Tell me a bit more about that beta. We talked about social and community issues. What are some of the key. And you talk a lot about design and products, so like from a product perspective, like what does that first product look like? What are the first kind of key features? It's changed a lot.

Jannick Malling (00:26:31):
So back in the day, we actually opened on the feet because it was obviously so clearly like the differentiator, and there was even an aspect of like the discovery angle kind of coming first. But then obviously with the fractional thing, that changed a lot over time, and we realized, okay, now we're just like a much better trading platform. Even had we not had the social thing, we'd still be highly differentiated, sort of superior for many use cases of trading platforms. And, you know, over time, a lot of people, basically almost all, I guess, kind of copied that feature inside a year, maybe 18 months. But again, that had given us enough time to kind of break out of things, stand on our own two legs, and build some brand awareness. Raised a bunch of money, innovated around a bunch of other features. Even fast forward to today, where we've now fractionalized bonds, first treasuries back in 2023, then corporate bonds kind of last year, which opens up a whole new world for investors. They can actually buy both sides of the balance sheet of their favorite companies, which again, in a world of not having CERB anymore, is quite interesting to folks who get anywhere between 4%, 7%, 8%, 9% yield in the corporate bond market, right? Yeah. So that just opens up the platform for folks that allows us to build things like Income Hop last year. Where we like, every month we project out or we actually show you how much cash flow your portfolio is generating, both in terms of dividends from stocks as well as interest from bonds and coupon payments and stuff. And so like, so again, I think, and maybe this is like a very financial services-specific thing, but like when you build these like really foundational things, they became stepping stones to building a bunch of other product features kind of on top. But yeah, in the early days. Very centered around social, then it became kind of the fractional thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:18):
And the social is what? Like, you sign up; you add your friends there; or you follow people?

Jannick Malling (00:28:22):
Yeah, you add your friends, you follow, you do all of the above. I think like in the very, very beginning, like in that beta period, it was like with your friends, right? And then we realized, hey, people don't necessarily have many friends that are super financially literate always. And so that puts certain people at a disadvantage. And so I think we opened up the social graph to be more interest graph-based, where it was more like, hey, if you own Apple, I own Apple. There's a news article about Apple launching a car tomorrow. Remember all this hype back in 2020? They were going to launch a car, whatever. Well, then we should both see that in our feed, and we should both comment on it. And by that way, so you're basically like, map on an interest, like you use the companies owned as sort of the interest graph. We did a lot of things with risk tolerance as well that we looked at. So there was a lot of stuff we did there with the algorithm that I think was quite interesting. But yeah, basically a feed-based approach. We played around with like group and messages stuff, but that stuff never really worked as well as we wanted it to, to be honest with you. I think there's just so many others, it was hard to see what the differentiator for us was, right? Because people have WhatsApp, iMessage, they have this. Of course they have all these other things. But on the feed, it was very much like there was a real value prop there for us because, you know, if you post something to the feed, we as Public have, all like, we've validated that you've actually bought it. And what was going on in a lot of these forums is like a lot of anonymous people just pumping and dumping stocks, and you have no idea if somebody really owned it or not, doctored screenshots, like all that stuff. And so I think that was really where the integrated brokerage and social graph experience made sense. Also, if I looked at your profile, if you were public with your portfolio, I could see what you actually own. Then again, I wouldn't have to second guess whether you actually own that or not.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:02):
And then when you launch Fractional, what stage is it? How many users do you have? How well are things already going online?

Jannick Malling (00:30:10):
Fractional was the sort of thing that we launched out of our beta with, I would say. So that was, I say, that was the real launch back in September of 2019. And I remember we had like maybe a thousand users.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:29):
Oh, so very, very small.

Jannick Malling (00:30:30):
Maybe two, like very, very, very tiny. Very, very early days, but like enough that you learn a bunch. I mean, that's the thing, like, a thousand users isn't a lot. But it's certainly more than enough that you need to learn. I mean, truth be told, probably when. I don't know, we were at three, four, five hundred users. We'd already learned what we needed to learn, and the remaining growth, really, from that trajectory, which is very slow-paced growth because, like a beta period type thing. But there was just like the 9 months that it took to build Fractional in the first place, right? So there was a long period where. We're like, we've learned all we needed to learn. Leave the platform running, but let's not really scale it yet. Let's just focus on building this fractional thing because that's going to fundamentally change everything. And by the way, this is still one of the wildest things. Like we launch it, after Labor Day, we've got all the dashboards set up. And literally, it's just one of these things where you go in, you refresh the dashboard after the first day. After the first week, and all the metrics are just up and to the right. 5, 10x easily.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:33):
Wow.

Jannick Malling (00:31:34):
And from there, we just kept on.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:36):
Do you remember specifics? Like what? Like your usage, your DAU to MAU ratio? Like, what were some of the ones that just kind of jumped off?

Jannick Malling (00:31:43):
All of it. Time spent in the app. We had this thing called Frequency that we looked at. I think Mixpanel used to call it addiction, but they changed the name, which is how many days in a week are you using the product and then how many times a day. And so you combine, you combine that into a ratio for engagement. But obviously also just the business metrics in terms of like new users, referrals, uh, conversion, frankly, in the funnel, which is always like a little bit tricky for, for highly sort of KYC, email.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:12):
Uh, did it just go viral? Like did the, did the media pick it up or how did you get all those new, this search of new users from?

Pablo Srugo (00:32:18):
It was, it was all organic pretty much. I wouldn't say that it, quote unquote, went viral because one of the things that we did, which was interesting, is. Normally the Lean Startup Playbook and all this stuff will tell you. Go after early adopters first and then scale there. And then once you have enough of those, you break into the mainstream. So, what's early adopters in the world of stock trading and investing? It's all the same trader bros that, you know, we've just said and kind of talked about that people were scared of. So we were like, probably we should not do that. And by the way, for what it's worth, a lot of those folks that are really kind of high-concentration risk, active like day trader folks, they were already on Robinhood, a lot of them. I'm very happy with that experience. So we were a little bit like, let's not start there. Let's just start a completely different place. But that actually went really against the traditional thinking because normally you go after the most organic, lowest CAG, highest conversion, most engaged kind of user base. We did something crazy and actually went out. So we went out to like professional women's communities, right? We parted with like, GirlBoss, for example. Sofia Amoruso's thing. People who've never invested before just went in front of them. Called, like, we built this. If you want to invest, we think this is a great option. And that really f'ing landed. And we saw super high conversion from that. And that's just like not a thing that people normally do. And if a startup was pitching me right now with that as the plan, I would probably tell them it's a little silly. Like, why don't you go over here kind of thirst? But that really worked for us. And so.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:46):
Why do you think that worked?

Jannick Malling (00:33:48):
Well, I think it worked. Because we actually had built the product back to who are we interviewing in the customer interviews. It wasn't the guy with six screens in Florida doing day trading. It was sort of like what we consider to be a little bit more regular kind of people, like young professionals. And so obviously those insights from the customer interviews beat all the way through the product solution in the end, specifically with regards to fractional and sort of this. And by the way, and the community aspect, it gave people a lot of common, a lot of comfort. A lot of confidence that I'm not doing it alone, right? If you think about anything in life, which is scary, would you then rather do it alone or with other folks, right? You want to watch a horror movie alone or with your friends, probably with your friends if you don't love horror movies, right? And so, anything that's scary in life becomes less scary by doing it with others. And so, in hindsight, it wasn't that big of a risk or surprise, I suppose, because it was just a full circle of the original insight from the product interviews rolling all the way through the product innovation that we launched with in the end. But at the time, I remember still thinking, We'll see how this goes. This is going to be a little bit like, No, we're not going to tell the board about this. We're just going to do it. And then thankfully it just worked kind of wonders. And so, yes, there was a lot of virality, but not in like the Thin Twit, stock twits kind of circles, the way that certain others did.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:14):
But you saw a lot of kind of like the word of mouth, like when you got somebody from GirlBoss, they told five people whatever it was.

Jannick Malling (00:35:19):
A hundred percent. And that was much more like that. That's the right, I think, framing there. For me, when I think about reality, I think about Twitter, YouTube. I think about these kinds of things, like hacker news stuff, like we didn't do that. For us, it was more like actual, just like very high-frequency word-of-mouth in a bunch of this untouched kind of territory.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:38):
Word of mouth is like the thing every single consumer app builder wants. Like, what do you think was there about your app that made people. Because somebody could come in, use it, be like, "This is awesome," and not tell anybody. Somebody could come in, use it, this is awesome, and tell five people. Like, you seem to have the latter. Like, do you have a sense of what it is that drives that kind of word of mouth?

Jannick Malling (00:35:59):
There were largely two camps. Number one was the word of mouth around fractional as product innovation and just literally as like a 10x better user experience. And so that breeded, a lot of word of mouth. But interestingly, that was more for the type of people who were a little bit curious about the stock market but maybe had never gotten fully into it. And so now this was a big unlock for them. Whereas for somebody that had never really experienced the stock market that much before, outside of the Hollywood movies, for all they know, Fractional could have existed for 10 years. So it was like a little bit of two camps. That second camp, the word of mouth was much more driven by, I would say, the psychological factors, a lot of the soft factors. The kind of vibe around the brand. I think specifically we went out and said. Hey, just the fact that we initially partnered with like some kind of young professional organization for women. Normally, not really at that time, at least, who you would associate with the stock market. Like that was a little bit of a purple cow in and of itself, to use a Seth Godin term. And these things, you know, whenever you do something that's a little bit outside the norm, like it comes with a higher degree of virality and word of mouth for sure. And then I think people could just really relate to the mission as well, to be honest. They just like, people really quickly just started to root for us. And we tried to, all the way through today, of course, to really always talk about building a fan base, not just a user base. really have people, because if that's where you set the bar in your customer service and frankly in everything, then you will also see that virality comes. I mean, it's never easy, but at least it comes easier relative to if all your users are just numbers in a dashboard and you just think about building the user base versus actually building a plan base.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:50):
And what about like the asset side? Obviously, a lot of these plays are all about kind of assets that are managed. What are the challenges of these plays? From the outside looking in. Is all of these new, let's say, relatively new players, like a Public, you know, you've got to start with people, like, what are they putting in? Is it $1,000, $10,000? It's not a million, like, you know, the Schwab's or whatever. How does that play out? Like, how does that work into kind of the business model?

Jannick Malling (00:38:10):
Well, to be fair, nobody on Schwab, not nobody, but all those players didn't put in a million. They'd put in $10,000 30 years ago, right? Like, I think that's actually how things compound, right? You look at Coinbase now, right? And it's like, yeah, there's a lot of people that bought Bitcoin. They had $100 bucks and they never put in millions, but now they have millions. So in Coinbase, just because, the nature of crypto, it didn't take the 30 years that it did in the public stock markets with Schwab and stuff. But look, I think this goes back to this thing of like, you, we had a long-term mission from the beginning always to be like more, less sort of like speculative, like be the place where you build your long-term final tried and true multi-decade portfolio. And like I said, fractional was a great way to do that because that's a great way that you unlock people to start in the first place. But then, because of what happened with COVID and 2021, SERP, GameStop, all that stuff, it took us like two years, honestly, after that initial launch with that feature set where we were just holding on for dear life. The user base was growing 50 to 100% every month. And that compounds a lot when you do that in a row. And so you're just really trying to scale the platform, and everybody kept going down at the time. And we took a lot of pride in not going down. And so really, you know, with the start, I mean, when we started our launch, our beta was like 15, 20 people. Right. And, so really, a lot of stuff that we had to build. On our roadmap that we had to push back a little bit just to capture all the growth that was happening at that moment. In 2022, or actually at the tail end of 2021, we went to the team. We said, Hey, next year, things are going to change. You'll see rates go up. You'll see a lot of people laying off people. We had, I think, not overgrown our organization the way many others had. So we felt we were in a good place. And I said, next year is the time for us to go back to delivering on the original vision and the original roadmap of really being that place where serious investors can build a serious, long-term, multi-decade portfolio. So that meant looking into treasuries; that meant looking into bonds; that meant building more research capability; that meant building multiple account types, like doing all that kind of work. And my only problem at the time, is I had said the exact same thing at the end of 2020. I was like, Hey, this year was an outlier, and then like 30 days later, GameStop happens on the 26th of January or whatever, and all bets are off, and like we're becoming one of the most downloaded apps in the country, and I'm like okay. You know, then we spent the rest of the year, like, basically catching up to that moment, right? And that was, like, probably, and I realize that's the thing that you don't, like, learn a lot from by hearing. So I'm sorry, but that was just, like, kind of what happened. But actually, the one learning is, I do think it's, like, if you do, and by all means, everybody should put all, every ounce of their effort into capturing that primary fit, lighting in a bottle, whatever you want to call it. But if you are awake at night and you can't sleep and you've done everything that you possibly could to get there, it is worth thinking about what might happen when you get there because there's also a lot of examples of folks that got that and are not around today, right? Clubhouse was a big deal in COVID and was like prime as like the next big social media. And like now they're not really. I think they shut it down. So I think it is actually worth thinking about not just like, how do I do that? But how do I build an enduring relationship business and an important company? And I think what you find is if you start there, the other thing kind of happens a little bit more naturally versus if you're just overly obsessed with finding product market fit without any underlying business model because that can be short-sighted as well. And so yeah, so for us, it was like a moment at the end of 2021 where we went back in 2022 and just built a lot. And then we started launching a lot of that stuff at the end of 2022. And you start to see the benefits of 23 and 24. And so to your question, I think we published some of these numbers on our blog post recently with our latest fundraising. But the number, like the first deposit, which is always a great indicator for like what this account is going to be worth; what they're going to keep depositing. on an ongoing basis even, has gone up, I don't even know, several orders of magnitude, right? Like 30, 40X.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:38):
Wow.

Jannick Malling (00:42:39):
During that timeframe. And so it is, but at the time, we were just like. The objective is, get people to sign up for Public. Put in a few hundred bucks that they've never invested before. Start there, and they were successful, and then we find more people.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:52):
So you were getting a few hundred bucks then. Now it's a few tenths, maybe $10K or something like that that you're getting.

Jannick Malling (00:42:56):
Yeah. Yeah. And so, and now it's actually also much more like we are much more the primary portfolio for people, the primary investing platform. I also think at the time, Jesus, everyone and their mother was setting up a trading platform in 2021. Like they partnered, PayPal was going to launch stock trading. So like people had this habit of like, I'm just going to spread out a couple hundred bucks and try these different platforms. So obviously we are one of the few ones left standing because, I kid you not, 98% of them have closed down, and maybe there was, only about 100. So like that's pretty easy. And so we get the benefit of that. But also a lot of it had to do with, a lot of that work that we put into finding product market fit again now for someone who has to build the final, last portfolio they ever built.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:43):
Because it's Fractional, like the core thing for you now or not anymore? No longer, right?

Jannick Malling (00:43:48):
No, no, not at all. No, no, I mean in the bond space it is, funnily enough, because we're the only ones that still have that, and so obviously that's been a great differentiator for the last couple of years, especially as yields have gone up and. But again, that was a good example of another thing. Where, like, reacting to market events, right? And I think obviously in finance is a big deal, but generally speaking, I think this is a skill that's important to own as well, of, like, we saw literally rates go up faster than they've ever done. We look around, it's very, very difficult to buy US treasury, but they're suddenly very, very attractive. You go back and look, and you realize, hey, there's not even a mobile app where you can buy bonds because guess what? The last time years went by was fucking pre-iPhone. So like literally, sorry if I'm swearing too much.

Pablo Srugo (00:44:32):
No, it's all good, man. It's just true, the bond thing. Like, you know, like I think in Canada, you still have to call. It's crazy.

Jannick Malling (00:44:38):
But this specific thing was wild. Like it was literally wild. And, you know, and so we just built this experience where you can buy a treasury bill in 30 seconds on your phone, fractionally, punch in a thousand bucks, 5,000, 100, whatever you want to do. And that captured the similar kind of lightning-in-a-bottle kind of moment that fractional shares did the first time. We then rolled that out with corporate bonds later in 2024. Now we have things like the bond account, which is just like a deposit withdrawal experience for investing in a basket of corporate bonds targeting a 6%, 7% yield. You build the foundational pieces, then you sort of layer the front-end UX on top, and there's multi-manifestations and how you can productize that. But those core innovations are really, really key because they ultimately drive us a lot of the growth at different points of time in our company's life, at least, as we've gone through these different cycles.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:32):
And then can you give me a sense of the scale of that growth? I don't know what your North Star metric is. I don't know if it's revenue or AUM or active users or whatever, but I'm curious, especially in that beginning, you had a few thousand. How fast to a million or whatever it is that North Star metric that you guys kind of look at.

Jannick Malling (00:45:49):
Yeah, I mean the North Star metric changed a little bit. In the beginning, it was users, right? How many accounts were signing up? And obviously, there was a bunch of secondary metrics that were very bold about engagement and retention and stuff. But to tell you the truth, those have always been stellar. So we realized, okay, we can just grow the, if you just grow the number of accounts, we're going to do good. Then I think it transitioned a little bit to be more asset-based. So that first deposit metric became really important for us, of course. And we focused on that for like a 12, 18-month period and really ramped that. There was like one specific 18-month period where I think it went up 25 or 30x or something.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:22):
What do you do? How do you ramp that? What's something you can do to increase the first deposit?

Jannick Malling (00:46:27):
It's focus. I mean, generally, the general feel is it's just focus, right? You orient a bunch of teams around, and you tell them that this is the number I want to see go up. Like a little bit like back to the Mark Zuckerberg thing where he just writes growth on the whiteboard. Like, I really think focus is one of the most underrated kinds of things, even though a lot of people probably like, I think it's like a little bit like with product market fit in itself, like a lot of people think that they've seen what a really focused effort is, but focus, discipline, and consistency over some period of time, I would argue that still it's one of the most rare things. And if people can really stick with that, I mean, talk to any YouTuber, and they'll tell you how they got their channel up is exactly by focus, consistency, and discipline over a prolonged period of time. And an investor, same thing, same thing goes for building products. So I think it's really just like a mindset thing. And then it's how you define focus. We always have this quote from Johnny Ive that we use, which is fantastic. I'm not going to do the British accent, so he makes it sound more sexy than I do. But in the Scandinavian accent, I can tell you it's something I like.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:35):
Yeah, don't worry.

Jannick Malling (00:47:37):
It's something like Steve telling him people can find this on YouTube, but it's Steve telling him focus is not because we have a bunch of ideas and we don't think they're not, worth doing. They might be phenomenal ideas, but we're deciding to sacrifice those ideas because we focus on this other thing. That's focus. Like, literally like having great ideas you're very excited about, not doing them because you're focused on something else. And I think that's such a good definition because most people feel like, yeah, no, that's a stupid idea. We should focus over here. Like, that's not even focus. Now you're just doing.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:11):
Yeah, that's just no-brainer stuff.

Jannick Malling (00:48:13):
Basic no-brainer prioritization, right? Really focus, is like, you know, you're in love with these five things, and you just pick one of them. So that's key for us. I think as a company, we also have a culture of just being really hardworking, really focused, really great at doing that, and really ramping. Like we've never had a metric that we point to, an all-star metric that we didn't just like ramp massively when we put our minds to it. And so for that reason, I think it's changed a little bit at this point. Obviously, we're a little bit larger scale. And so I would say we're more kind of revenue focused. And obviously, as a company that have, I think, a very good cost structure, you know, that revenue leads to profitability. And I mean, that, then I think there's nothing else that you can really focus on sort of beyond that, right? Like then you're the first, like then you've gone as far down as you can in the income statement. But I do think you start really high up, typically with users, engagement, retention, kind of different things.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:12):
How fast did you hit maybe a million MAUs or whatever?

Jannick Malling (00:49:15):
Probably 18 months, two years. I mean, GameStop was a step change, right? So it was all around there. So yeah, call it those kinds of 18 months. GameStop was like, we doubled in 48 hours or something.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:27):
Wow.

Jannick Malling (00:49:28):
That was wild.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:29):
Just the GameStop situation, like when the stock just went berserk. A lot of attention went to Public.

Jannick Malling (00:49:34):
Yeah, and specifically, yeah, yes. And then obviously that got into massive overdrive when a bunch of companies decided to turn off the buy button, right? Yes, right. Famously. But I think in that moment, I think luck favors the prepared. And we had done, actually, a lot of things where we couldn't foresee that happening. But we had foreseen for a while how, you know, if a competitor stumbles, you want to be able to take advantage of that as quickly as you can. Right. I mean, business is the ultimate sport, and it is highly competitive. And so I think Leif and I are both very competitive kind of people. And so we had a lot of things where like we had account transfer ads that was kind of ready to go that we could upload without having to go through approval on all the social media sites or compliance, et cetera, because they're pre-signed off and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of things, Leif has talked about this. I mean, in kind of growth playbooks of like, you could put yourself in a position to like take advantage of some of these market moments. And yeah, GameStop would have always been winning our backs no matter what, but for it to have that step change, I think a lot of it had to do with all of the preparation that we put into always being ready for like a moment like that. So it was hard to find the time to like do those kinds of things, but that certainly was very high ROI work, like sort of half a year earlier when we had started to put all those things in motion.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:58):
That makes sense. Well, listen, we'll stop it there. I'm going to ask the last two questions. We always end on kind of quick, quick-fire questions, sort of thing. First one is we talked about product market fit, so I won't ask that one. I think that that's pretty clear when you are fractional. But was there actually a time, where you thought maybe things wouldn't work out, like we're actually maybe Public would just fail?

Jannick Malling (00:51:18):
No, there was never a time where, I thought I would fail. I don't also just generally think I would ever, the type of person I am, allow myself to have that mindset ever. Any smell of that, you know, I think I would resent it heavily also from people on the team, partially because if somebody would walk into my office and think we're going to fail, I would say like, well, you're fired because then you should have told me six months ago when you had the first inkling that there's a 1% chance that we might fail, like something to that effect, right? And so But I think I would say there was a moment in 22, obviously, when all the game sales have died down. We've taken a lot of users, and we needed to find product market fit again this time and becoming a serious platform where people can invest their life savings. And I don't think we'd fail, but it was a mountain of work. It's a mountain of work that we had to do. But actually what was great is at that point we stopped hiring. And when you stop hiring, you have higher output because all of your time, like every employee is in the J curve, they actually take time before they start being productive. And so when you, on this blog post that we put out in October, you can also see our shipping velocity, and you can see how it just has compounded like crazy. By the way, very high correlation to gross profit per user and net deposits and other metrics that we put in that. It is literally wild to see those free charts just stacked on top of each other, almost like a perfect match. And so I was never in doubt that we could do it because I was like, if we can ship enough of these things with a high enough quality fast enough, I know that they're going to work. And I never had any concern that we would be able to ship those things. I just wanted to sort of whip the team into shape to get it done as fast as humanly possible.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:55):
And then, last question. What's your kind of number one piece of advice for early-stage founders?

Jannick Malling (00:53:00):
I often say, make sure that you really find an important, endearing problem. So like almost like a timeless problem. I think there's some quote I can remember, who said this of like, "The timeless problems are the best." The solutions to them might change over time. But if you find a problem that's ephemeral, you will just put so much hard work, you'll do all the sacrifices, the personal sacrifices. And if that problem goes away, your shit doesn't matter what solution you come up with. So really think about the problem that you're solving and make sure that it's really a problem that is going to almost always exist. And oftentimes you see these people trying to take advantage of a quick social phenomenon in the social app space or some regulatory hack or whatever. And like, I mean, obviously, I'm pro-entrepreneur at the end of the day, and I love when people are building. So go for it. But if it were me knowing what the cost is of actually building a skilled company personally and otherwise. As fun as it is, it comes at a great cost. Like, man, just make sure that it's all going to be really worth it and there's nothing where people can like flitter around and it's gone the next day. And for me, again, investing, yes, like 100% of people will for the next hundreds and hundreds of years, always going to have to invest. If everybody invested in the world. So much of a greater place, like everything just clicks with that mission because then you can let it be all-consuming because you know that nobody's ever going to be able to basically rug pull your problem.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:37):
Perfect. Well, Jannick , thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great.

Jannick Malling (00:54:40):
Yeah, it was fun. Thanks.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:41):
You remember, like, the first person who told you about Bitcoin? The first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends. Send it to them on WhatsApp. Put it in a WhatsApp group. Put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said. If you ain't first, you're last.