Welcome to Breaking Banks. The number one. Killing it, killing it.

Jake Gibson is a founding partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures. He has a multi-time reinvention story. In this episode of Killing It, he shares his path from Wall Street to entrepreneurship, to angel investor and eventually VC.

We talk about our commitment issues and what happens when your startup is no longer your identity. I met Tim Chen and Jake around 2011, about a year after they co-founded NerdWallet. They were early in the journey and I had a front row seat to the bumps and bruises before they broke out.

Underneath the veneer of success, however, Jake shares how in a company that quickly outgrew his ability to keep figuring it out, he had to figure out what was next. This led to the hard decision with Tim, who was not just a co-founder, but a friend, that it was time for him to leave. Watching a company you helped co-found go on to be publicly traded can be hard, especially when it was so much of your identity.

On this episode of Killing It, we talk about what’s in your wallet and the journey to being more than a single card. So, you know, I hadn’t thought about this until preparing for our interview and the time we’ve known each other. You actually have two transformation stories, right? And it’s interesting, in that journey, you had kind of a dream job, right, that so many graduating from highly analytical places in Ivy Leagues aspire to, as you’re getting into the trading world with J.P. Morgan, you know, successful enough career, you know, that you’d done.

So, first, how did you decide that you kind of had jumped into what looked like a dream job, but you were willing to walk away to go do something new at a time when that new sort of thing around doing, you know, when it was both content and fintech, 2010 wasn’t exactly the time that you’d say, hey, this is guaranteed to be a rocket ship. Yeah, no, not at all. And actually, it goes a little bit deeper, because I did have the dream job.

I was recruited out of college to work on a fixed income crop trading desk, actually. So, you know, one of the top trading desks at J.P. Morgan, one of the top fixed income trading desks in the market at that time. Well, and I’d also like to point out a trading desk that I had gotten turned down from in 1996, but that is neither here nor there.

Yeah, it was a great spot to be. And, you know, very, I guess, you know, I was the first person they’d hired out of college in many years. It was a pretty small team.

They kind of kept the same team for a long time. They hired me as an intern, first intern they’d had in a long time, and then they hired me full time. And so it was kind of the dream job, but it was a prop desk, and then 2008 happened, right? And so we blew up, all the prop desks shut down, and I got moved over to the swaps desk on the sell side.

Still a great desk. Like my boss was amazing. It was a great team.

J.P. Morgan was a fixed income trading powerhouse at the time, but I had already decided before the financial crisis happened that this wasn’t really for me. Like after a few years on Wall Street, I was like, you know, making decent money, and it’s very, it looks really good on my resume, but I’m like not really learning anything that I care about. I’m not helping people except like helping my bosses get richer, and I wasn’t building anything or owning anything of value really.

Meanwhile, I’d grown up in front of a computer. I’d been programming since a young age. When I went to school, I thought I was gonna study computer science, but ended up getting distracted after the internet bubble burst and going the Wall Street route instead, and I wanted to fix that mistake.

So like, you know, 2007, the iPhone comes out. I’m on the trading desk reading TechCrunch, reading about my buddies from college who are starting companies and all this cool shit happening in Silicon Valley, and I wanted to be part of that. I just didn’t know how.

And after the internet bubble burst, or sorry, after the financial crisis happened, I was like, well, it doesn’t really matter how. I don’t wanna be here, and so I decided I was gonna quit my job and just move to California and figure something out when I got there, and I thought I would just start like banging away, like building something. It would suck.

It would fail, but at least I’d learn a lot in that process, and from that learning experience, maybe be able to get a job at a real tech company. The way that I thought about it was like, I don’t wanna go to business school. I don’t wanna go to grad school.

I don’t wanna spend the money. Even though I did take the GRE and I did take the GMAT, I just didn’t wanna spend the money and like the time to go to business school. I figured if I just start building something, that will be my business school.

I will learn, and then maybe I can kind of like whitewash my resume such that going forward, I look more like a tech person. But my buddy, Tim, who I’d known since middle school, Tim and I go back to eighth grade in Atlanta. He had also left his job on Wall Street and was starting to work on what would become NerdWallet.

It was all his idea. Like he’d been thinking about this for years and decided to start hacking away at it. And I just jumped on and started helping.

I didn’t really have a plan. I was just like, I wanted to do tech stuff and I wanna build and I wanna create something. And here Tim is doing the same thing.

So I’m just gonna jump on his kind of coattails. Well, and so the original plan was to whitewash the resume from I’m not a finance bro to I can go do techie things, despite what was it, eight years on Wall Street, eight-ish? Six, six years, yeah. So I’ve got the Wall Street time.

I’m not trying to come in and say, put me in the finance department or put me on some kind of biz dev. You want it to be techie. In the startup world then, remember, it wasn’t what it is now.

So none of these companies were hiring for finance people, right? Nobody was hiring from Wall Street to come join tech companies. They wanted engineers, products, designers, and that was it. Well, exactly, right? It’s like you get all the X investment bankers, Wall Streeters and consultants going, I can be your chief strategy officer.

And you’re like, we don’t need a chief strategy officer. We need someone who writes code. Yep, exactly.

But walk us through some of those early Rocky years with NerdWallet, because being an early partner from our Perk Street days, how I got to know you and Tim, right? Like it was not all fun and games is this whole idea of comparison engines and content marketing, you know, were really nascent. Yep. Yeah, it was kind of a meandering path that I think it’s worth kind of, I guess pointing out or reminding everybody like NerdWallet was bootstrapped.

So we didn’t raise any outside capital. We didn’t have VCs. We didn’t have any advisors in Silicon Valley.

We were literally just two dudes from New York working in a closet together. There wasn’t all the blog posts and everything that there are now about how to start a company. And, you know, we didn’t, we didn’t even think of ourselves as a tech company because that just wasn’t as much of a thing then.

Like we were an LLC for the first two years, right? Just to give you a sense. And so I would say the first few years were just extremely Rocky in general. Like we didn’t earn any revenue for the first two years.

And so we couldn’t pay ourselves. The first idea was basically like a kayak for credit cards, right? This credit card comparison, like you were saying, but nobody gave a shit about that. You can put something like that out on the internet and people don’t just show up, right? So that’s how we started to realize like we need to do SEO well, we need to do marketing well.

And then we started pouring all of our time and attention and resources into those things. And that was very much a learning experience. Like our view was there’s all these people on the internet doing kind of black hat SEO and that’s going to fail eventually.

You know, maybe they’re making money now. They’re kind of like arbing the system, essentially hacking the system, but Google’s smarter than they are. And it’s only a matter of time.

And so we’re like, how are we going to do like just good SEO? Like let’s just write good shit. Let’s get people to link to it. Let’s figure out how to get people to care about us and just hammer the marketing and the press, content marketing, PR, you name it.

But we had to kind of learn from scratch how to do all of those things while also learning from scratch how to build the website, like how to manage our servers, like all this stuff. And it really was just the two of us. And so that was tough.

You know, we kind of gave ourselves two years, like I was saying before, you know, business school more or less before we kind of threw in the towel. And it took just about two years before Google gave a shit about us, you know, before our kind of thesis about SEO started to play out. And we really just got lucky because it was like banging our heads against a wall, not making any money, not having any traffic for a couple of years.

And then one day, Google just rolled out a ton of really aggressive algorithm updates, like literally overnight. Like we walk in the next day and we’re like, what the hell is going on? Like our traffic is through the roof. Our competitors have kind of fallen out of the search rankings.

And it was all just because like, that was the timing that Google decided to roll out whatever they were called Penguin and Panda and like the subsequent updates to those SEO algorithms or the search algorithms. And that kind of put us on the map. Like we went from, I think I don’t even remember the exact numbers, but like effectively $0 of revenue in the first half of 2011.

So I think we ended the year with like a million and a half in the bank or something like that. And it was all because of that one day. And so we spent two years dicking around and trying to figure something out and up and down and up and down until that happened.

In those up and downs, like that’s a long time to grind without a safety net. And at a time that venture checks were just being flung around, were there times that either you or Tim wanted to throw in the towel and it took the other person to kind of grab the towel and take it away to keep from walking away at that point? Can’t say it ever got to that line. I think like, I was definitely a lot more insecure about these things than Tim ever was.

Tim just has like an extremely long-term view even today as CEO of the company. Whereas, you know, I was definitely worried about my financial situation, worried about what was happening with the company. So there were a lot of conversations about that.

I mean, I trusted him and I kind of had a timeline. It was like, eventually my runway is going to run out and we have to get a job. But until then, like, I trust him.

The things that he’s saying and like his strategies and stuff like that make a lot of sense. We just need to put our heads down and keep working. And I mean, at the end of the day, like I was having fun.

I mean, it was a lot of hard work and a lot of stress, but working directly with Tim, a friend of mine, like owning something and building something and, you know, every day I was learning new things. And, you know, you could build something, put it up on the internet and the next day you’d like see the results of that. Like that was cool to me, especially after six years on Wall Street, kind of doing the same thing day in and day out.

And we kind of had this like pirate approach to it too, where we’re like kind of attacking companies that were these like fraudulent debit cards and stuff that were popping up all the time back then. Like we brought a bunch of them down by kind of writing blog posts about them and kind of reporting them to the authorities and called out a bunch of scams at the time. And we were doing it for marketing, but it was also just a lot of fun to go out and like research these things and kind of bring down these people that were really just scamming consumers.

And so that part of it was fun too. It was like really guerrilla marketing in its purest form. So once you turned that corner, was it all up into the right then for a while? It’s funny because I think like, revenue and everything, I think it was up into the right for a long time.

And a lot of that was just the economy recovering from the financial crisis. So like as banks were starting to kind of compete with each other and stuff for market share and MX and Chase specifically were kind of fighting each other for wallet share. Like our revenues were growing even when our traffic wasn’t growing because they were paying more and more for referrals.

And so we kind of like succeeded in spite of ourselves for a long time is the way that we started to think about it. But the company internally, like we’re growing, we’re adding headcount. We clearly had no idea what we were doing.

We didn’t know how to manage people. We didn’t know how to scale an organization. We didn’t know how to like set goals and hold people accountable and like communicate with the organization and stuff like that.

And so that was tough. That was really tough. And there were definitely 2013, I think we laid off 25% of our headcount right before Christmas, just because we had made a bunch of hiring mistakes and it took us too long to correct them.

And then eventually we had to correct like too much of it at the same time. And that wasn’t the last time that NerdWallet had to do something like that. So, you know, building the actual business was extremely difficult and had its ups and downs, even when like the performance of the business looked great.

Like we picked the right market, we had the right time and we got really lucky on a lot of things, but we still, you know, fucked any number of things up in terms of actually building the organization and building business. Yeah. Well, I mean, those things are hard to do while you’re building for the first time.

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Alloy Labs is the industry leader in helping fearless bankers drive exponential growth through collaboration, exclusive partnerships and powerful network effects that give them an unfair advantage. Learn more at alloylabs.com. Alloy Labs, banking unbound. At what point did you begin to, you know, either look externally or, you know, what led to the next reinvention from Jake the investment banker to Jake the entrepreneur to Jake the VC? What was that journey? So that was kind of a confluence of events.

So also around the 2013 timeframe, you know, all of these things are going wrong in terms of us as a management team. I had kind of taken on too much in terms of different roles within the organization and was not particularly good at any of them. I kind of had four or five different roles as CEO, like running finance, running HR, running legal, you know, kind of being like co, kind of also playing this like COO role of like being the other management or kind of being the other founder besides Tim that people reported to and managing our exec team.

And so, and I wasn’t doing any of them particularly well. I was being pulled in way too many different directions. And I think the cracks in the foundation were certainly starting to show.

I think the feedback that I got, and I guess what I kind of internalized was that the company was growing a lot faster than I could learn. And so we ended up deciding in the summer of 2013, like A, we shouldn’t be doing this alone. Like we need to be talking to execs from other companies that have built and scaled either senior execs, like actual COO type people, but we should also be talking to heads of engineering, heads of product, heads of recruiting, heads of finance, heads of legal, whatever it happens to be.

Like we should be talking to the top people at a lot of the top companies out there to try to figure out like what’s missing in NerdWallet and how to do these things well. And then ultimately deciding like, based on what we need to do well and what we’re not doing well, are there like senior people that we should be bringing into the organization to scale things in the way that we don’t know how, that we’re not experts. You know, again, like we didn’t have venture investors.

We didn’t have advisors. We didn’t have anybody telling us the right things to do. We’re kind of figuring it all out from first principles.

But we realized like we don’t have to do that for everything. Like we can kind of plug and play people into certain roles and have them kind of teach us how to scale and help us scale the organization. And this was happening at the same time that my wife was pregnant with twins.

And so it kind of all came together at the same time where the company is doing really well, we’re really profitable. We ended up hiring a new head of finance, a new head of engineering, a new head of talent and a COO kind of all within the same timeframe that my kids were born. And so ultimately had kind of a hard conversation with Tim, where I mean, ultimately he was kind of like, look, are you going to leave? He’s like, what’s your plan? Like, we’re kind of replacing you.

It doesn’t seem like it makes sense for you to kind of go on paternity leave and then come back and try to find like a new role in the company as like co-founder, but like not co-executive leadership. What would that even look like? And he was right. And so kind of spent a lot of time thinking about it, worked with him to figure out an exit plan for me.

And then a few months after my kids were born, I kind of went on permanent paternity leave. And so that was like the exit story from NerdWallet. Fortunately, like I was able to kind of work out an arrangement where when I left, I didn’t have to worry about money and I didn’t have to run out and kind of get a job the next day.

And so I was able to take some time decompressing, like unlinking my identity from NerdWallet, which is probably the hardest part. And I talked to a lot of founders about this when they close their companies down or break up with their co-founders or they just leave the company that they started or something. The hardest part, I think for all of us is like, that wasn’t just our baby.

It was like, it was us. Like it was such a huge part of us for so long, showing up every day, like working on that same problem, like pouring your heart and soul and your time and everything into it. And then one day it’s just not there.

And so that was very difficult. I took a lot of time to kind of process that. But in that time, started hanging out with friends of mine that were starting companies, trying to help them out, trying to take some of the things that I learned from NerdWallet and like use them to help other founders as they were starting on their journeys and kind of pay it forward at the end of the day, like just help people and meet people and just be a productive part of the ecosystem.

Even if I wasn’t kind of running a company and that very quickly snowballed into angel investing and kind of kicked off the next phase of my life. So before we get into the next phase for, you know, especially within financial services and FinTech specifically right now, there are a lot of companies that unless they can figure things out quickly they aren’t going to be able to raise the next round. And I know based on the feedback we get on this series, as well as, you know, the entrepreneurs that we talked to that that struggle, this idea that not only are they turning, you know, losings of the business and money and the money of people who trusted them, oftentimes friends and family and letting VCs down, they’re worried what they’re going to do professionally.

They’re also losing part of that identity. What helped you get over that hump of the gap that, you know, goes out? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing was just time.

And I had the luxury of a lot of time that I guess other people don’t really have, but time, like finding other ways to keep myself busy and to feel successful, I think was a big part of it. So like, I didn’t go out feeling like a success, right? Like I left feeling like a failure. Like a lot of the people that you’re describing.

And so I think kind of figuring out what my calling in life was and what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, and really kind of starting to focus on my strengths and where I can succeed, I think made a big difference for me. And, you know, in that time I was like, you know, I was a new dad. So I was like kind of taking care of my kids.

That helped a little bit. I focused a lot on fitness. So I spent that whole time kind of eating well and exercising and stuff, and then helping out these other founders.

And that was a big part of it for me because it was like, you know, I did actually learn a lot from this experience. And even if I kind of personally failed at a point, like there was a lot of success that led to that, right? Like, you know, we got lucky, but there was also a lot of hard work and a lot of putting ourselves in a position to be lucky. So like, you know, I didn’t succeed at like that particular phase of the company’s life, but there was a lot of things that I learned along the way that could benefit other founders.

And I would come away from these meetings with these other founders where they would, it was just so rewarding because I could tell that like the things that I was helping them with were actually making a difference to them, making a difference to the trajectory of the company. And that helped me kind of feel not so much like a failure. And I think that really helped me kind of start to move on.

One thing I worry about in the current environment that’s changed for the time for you and I, each going through a transformation, which is about the same time, you don’t have, you know, 2013, 14, wasn’t exactly the same kind of social media world where on X or publishing on LinkedIn, this idea of like, everyone’s kind of the expert and how I learned this, that part of what I worry and wanted to highlight in this series is I see a lot of people that I’m like, they’re spinning the shutdown as a success and everything they’ve learned. You can see that they’re a zombie, but I worry like there’s this psychological dissonance. And what are they really feeling underneath because they feel so much social pressure to appear successful? I don’t know, did you feel like you had to appear successful coming out of it? No, that’s not really been my vibe.

And actually it kind of drives me crazy when people do that, like run into way too many companies where they’re always crushing it, even though you know exactly what’s going on in the business and they’re absolutely not. Or companies when they shut down, they try to spin it. Like you said, there’s some of that here in the FinTech world that’s happened very recently.

Try to spin it as like a success or something. And that kind of drives me crazy because like we should all just be like, failure is a natural part of Silicon Valley and it’s a natural part of building companies. And there’s a lot more failure than success out there.

And I think the goal of these failures should be to learn from them and to move on. I think the people that write the blog posts about like, I’m shutting down my company and these are all the things that I learned and these are all the things that went wrong should absolutely be admired for that. And I have this conversation with a lot of founders when they’re shutting their companies down.

Basically it’s like, don’t be too hard on yourself like this happens all the damn time. Like it doesn’t get talked about on X. It doesn’t get kind of lauded the same way that mega fundraisers and stuff like that do. But it’s a totally normal part of the ecosystem.

The only thing you want to ask yourself is like, did I do my best? Or was it like a bunch of own goals and a bunch of kind of, were there obvious things that I screwed up that I knew I was screwing up and I did it anyway? Then that you should learn from. But otherwise, if you did your best and failed anyway, that’s kind of the name of the game. And so I don’t, I don’t know.

I think they’re kind of crushing it mentality and everybody feeling like they have to spend everything as a success and all the thought leadership and huge air quotes on LinkedIn and X and everything drives me up the wall. Well, let’s talk about the reinvention. You picked yourself up in the process.

You began angel investing. What was the next phase of the journey? And what did you kind of skills and thought process did you use to figure out that reinvention? Yeah, it was, you know, it’s funny cause it was kind of two more reinventions. So the first one was kind of like decompressing from nerd wallet, becoming an angel investor.

And that was a period of my life where I was very much like, I am not committing to anything. Angel investing was a good way for me to like meet a lot of people, learn a lot, help a lot of people, but not fall into anything as a full-time commitment. Kind of people reaching out to see if I wanted to come work at their startups or like help them start things or whatever.

And I was just like, no, I’m not committing full-time to anything. Even when I started working with Sheila back in 2016 on 500 FinTech, I told him like, you know, I’m happy to be kind of a part-time EIR and help you build this and help you mentor the companies and help you source the companies and kind of just come and go as I please. And be a meaningful part of this.

But like, I do not want to be a full-time employee of 500 startups. I do not want to commit to anything fully. So I’m going to stay over here, angel investing, but I’m also going to help you over here on this side.

And a lot of that was because like, I want to figure out what I want to do with my life. What I’m willing to like, what is worth me not being at home with my kids? It was like a big part of it, you know, because this whole time I’m like, I’m there with my kids every day, like watching their first steps, watching them roll over for the first time, there for their first words, taking them to all of their activities, spending all this time with them. Like what is worth taking me away from that, that I would actually want to commit my life to.

And like, well, I’ll wake up every morning excited to do it. And it took me a long time to figure that out. And angel investing was a great thing because it was kind of a forcing function to build a track record, to meet a lot of people, to expand my network.

Because coming out of NerdWallet, I didn’t have much of a network, right? Like we were, again, just kind of like in our own little silo, doing our own thing. And I didn’t have a lot of connectivity within Silicon Valley as a whole. And so angel investing kind of forced me to get out there and do a lot of that.

And I think the way that I viewed it was optionality. Like if I want, if I end up deciding that I want to start a company, if I end up deciding I want to join a company or start a VC fund or join a VC fund or just keep doing what I’m doing, this puts me, this is like the maximum surface area for opportunity, as far as that is concerned, no matter which direction I decide to go, building the network and learning all these things and learning about all these businesses is probably the best first step to get there. And so that’s how I thought about it.

But then eventually, especially after working with Sheil for a while, really enjoyed working with him. It kind of started to feel like it was natural that we were going to continue working together. We didn’t want to stay at 500 startups.

We didn’t want to start a new, we didn’t want to start a new fund within 500 because they had a bunch of their own problems and ultimately decided that we were going to start a fund. And so that was kind of the next reinvention because that more or less was me coming out of retirement and getting back to building. So starting a fund from scratch, a lot like starting a company, obviously not nearly as hard as like starting a high growth company, but there’s a lot of similarities between the work that goes into starting a fund from scratch, building a team, building a brand, fundraising, all that stuff as there is to starting a company.

And so that was me and Sheil teaming up and kind of getting back to building. It’s interesting. I hadn’t fully processed in my own journey that there was a five-year period of commitment issues where I was happy to consult to banks and advise startups and angel invest, but I had real commitment issues because like the feeling of failure coming out of Perk Street that I had poured so much into in combination of market conditions and self-inflicted wounds, right? And it’s hard to disaggregate those.

It feels kind of like a lot of it is all your fault sometimes, but it was a commitment issue at the end of the day, right? Like to put my passion on something 100% again, then if it fails, I could be pointed at as like, you failed again. Did you have a worry like when you and Sheil went to market that what if this is another one that doesn’t work out? Not that per se, but I think we definitely, we went back and forth a lot. I think it took us at least a year before we fully decided, like after we decided we were gonna work together, but before we decided what we were gonna do together, it was at least a year, year and a half process.

And some of that was me kind of hedging, like maybe we should just go out and raise a small fund, kind of like an angel fund, just writing a bunch of small checks and continuing what I was doing as an angel, but leveraging it with other people’s capital a little bit or kind of writing a spring and praying, which is a small check, similar to what we did with the accelerator. That was more or less me hedging and not really feeling convicted that we could level up and do more than that. But spending enough time with Sheil, I think we’ve kind of both got convinced that there was an opportunity here.

And we had to kind of look back over what we had accomplished as angel investors and with 500 startups, 500 FinTech and say, actually, we kind of already proven that we can do this. Like convincing a founder to take 150K check or whatever it was for six or 7% of their company isn’t much more, it didn’t feel like that should be more difficult than convincing a founder to let us lead the round and write a larger check, which was kind of the biggest strategic jump from the accelerator to starting a new fund. So then the open question was like, how much could we raise? And we put together kind of an envelope model and decided like we wanted a $60 million fund, but we’re constantly told along the way, like you should aim for less or maybe if you aim for that amount, like be happy if you only raise 30 or 40 or something and just get out there and start investing.

We got that feedback from a lot of people, including people that ended up becoming our LPs. And so there were a lot of reasons to kind of doubt ourselves along the way. We ended up pulling it together.

I think we executed very well. I think we didn’t give ourselves enough credit for the track record and the reputation that we’d already built, like the work we’d done with founders and how that benefited our brand, the connections that we’d made in terms of people that were willing to invest in us. And then naturally, just like with NerdWallet, we got very lucky, like 2019, 2020, FinTech’s blowing up even all the way into 2021.

And so raising our first two funds benefited a lot from the market as well. And we are very cognizant of the fact that the timing just was stellar, even if it wasn’t intentional. But yeah, a lot of reasons to doubt ourselves.

And then we got lucky, kind of very similar to NerdWallet. So for someone who’s looking at, down the barrel of, hey, this probably isn’t going to work out or might not work out or I can blindly pretend that it is an influencer my way until I run into the wall, might not be as lucky that the wall falls first. What advice would you give to begin to mentally prepare yourself for that change of identity and the re-exploration of what’s next? I think the best advice, and I had this conversation with another founder recently when he was thinking about starting a company, was like, when it’s time, you just know.

If you’re asking yourself, should I start a company or should I not start a company, then you’re not ready. If you can’t help yourself, if all you ever think about is this or you absolutely know that you’re going to start something, that’s when it’s time. And I think that’s what it was for us, was we just knew.

We could feel it. And we knew that there were going to be bumps along the way, things weren’t going to go according to plan, but you kind of… Sheila and I are both founders, and I think the kind of people that get attracted to founding also tend to be the kind of people that have almost an unreasonable optimism in their ability to just figure it out. We weren’t… I had never started a company before.

I didn’t know anything about writing web software. I didn’t know anything about managing the servers. I didn’t know anything about marketing or PR or any of the stuff that we were doing, hiring, firing.

We had to learn it all from first principles, but we came into it with this idea that, yeah, it’s scary, but it’s not rocket science. You can figure it out eventually if you just put in the work. And I think that’s kind of how we approached the fund too, was, yeah, it’s going to be hard.

There’s a million people out there trying to do it, but we’ll figure it out. And what goes wrong goes wrong, but we’ll be okay. We’ll do something.

It’s not going to be a total failure. And I think that’s kind of just the mentality. That is the founder of mentality.

And I don’t know if it’s a mentality that you can create in someone or if it’s just kind of innate and natural, but I think that when you can feel that, that you just can’t help yourself, that’s when it’s time. Well, and I think that requires a greater sense of self versus the perception of social media about yourself or what you believe social media should be perceiving about you. Yeah.

Yeah, you can’t hold on too tightly to any one identity or definition of yourself or hold on too tightly and define yourself by your successes and failures. Because we went out there and told everybody we were going to raise a $60 million fund, but if it had only been 30, we would have gone back out there and said, oops. And actually at one point in the fundraise, we did because COVID hit, right? We did our first close in December of 2019.

We were going to do our second close at the end of March, 2020. And we didn’t raise significantly more capital between the first close and kind of mid-March when the world shut down. And so we kind of went back to our LPs and we’re starting to communicate to the outside market, like this is only a $30 million fund.

The world is over, but we’re going to make do. Fortunately, the world changed in a way that we did not expect and we ended up getting it done and actually hit our hard cap and ended up raising 75. But again, luck.

But we were ready to take our lumps and just say like, we failed at the 60, but here we are and here’s our new plan. Well, love the honesty and sharing the journey with us. And folks, if they don’t already follow BTV, Better Tomorrow Ventures and what you guys are accomplishing with the Mint, you absolutely should.

Yeah, thank you. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer, Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer, Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarra and Sylvie Johnson.

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