How a Solo Founder is Reshaping Global Finance (Parth Garg, CEO of Aspora)

Speaker A: You wake up one morning in Bangalore and discover that your co-founder has left the company, left the country, and you're suddenly having to deal with this all yourself. Speaker B: He's not in his room. His room is all packed up. 4 m. He left. He went to the airport, took a flight to SF, and from the airport he'd message our investors. It says, we're deciding to shut the company down and we'll return the capital. Speaker A: I think a lot of the times folks from the outside see these incredible company stories and they don't realize that almost all of them have at least one moment or two like this where things can go the other way so easily.

I'm curious how you think about are you built to be a solo founder? Was that actually the right path for you? Speaker B: I don't think anyone should be a solo founder. It's just easier when you have people around you that are in the same boat as you, because as the company scales, your employees start taking up functions, you hire over them, and the company grows, and there's no one next to you. It becomes quite lonely. Speaker C: In the summer of 2022, Parth Garg woke up in Bangalore to discover that his co-founder had fled the country.

And emailed their investors to tell them that their company was dead. A little over 3 years later, and Espora is now one of fintech's fastest-growing startups. The company, which makes it faster and cheaper for India's diaspora to send money home and access banking services, is now processing over half a billion dollars every month and has earned a $500 million valuation with backing from elite investors like Hummingbird, Sequoia, and Greylock. Today, Parth and I discuss how stablecoins have revolutionized the financial system, why India's diaspora is such a valuable market to target, and what it really takes to survive the dark moments of building a transformative company.

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Because in the age of AI, truth isn't just power, it's protection. See what Guru is doing for thousands of companies like Spotify, DHL, and Stripe at com. That's com. Speaker A: Parth, it's awesome to have you here. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time. Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, Mario. Speaker A: I think you are building one of the most interesting and exciting companies in the world, so we're gonna talk a lot about Aspora, about stablecoins, about India. But I wanna sort of start with what I imagine would be one of the hardest parts of this journey and maybe sort of figure out how you got there and how you got out of it, which was in summer of 2022.

You are the founder of a company at this point, and you wake up one morning in Bangalore, I think, and discover that your co-founder has left the company, left the country, and you're suddenly having to deal with this all yourself. Like, take, take, take us back to that moment maybe and how that felt. Speaker B: We had actually ended the previous night on a pretty heated argument. We both realized that the idea that we were initially working on is not going to scale. It's not the right idea to work on.

We told this to our investors. We bought time to figure out what to do next. And obviously it was very stressful. He wanted to take a completely different direction. He wanted us to move back to the US. Build something in enterprise. We were still figuring it out. I wanted to continue doing fintech. I wanted to stay in India. And the biggest problem was we were both co-CEOs, and that, that I think never works out because we're both alpha-type personalities. He's fantastic. I would like to think I'm great as well. And we couldn't come to a decision, so we ended up, uh, well, I guess, uh, really pissed with each other, going back to our rooms.

Uh, I wake up at, I guess, 8 AM, and there's a panic text from one of our investors saying that, hey, Parth, what is going on? I'm like, what do you mean? And he forwards me a message from John, which says, who was my co-founder, which says, we're deciding to shut the company down and we'll return the capital. And so I go and try to find John in the room. I don't find him. I wake up with my team members. We all at this point used to live together. We were like 8 of us, John and I, and then 6 of our team members in this one house.

And so we try to figure out what's going on. I can't find him. I'm trying to call him. It doesn't go through. We ended up checking the CCTV cameras, trying to figure out what happened. He's not in his room. His room is all packed up. Apparently, like 4, he left. He went to the airport, took a flight to SF, was on that flight, and from the airport he'd messaged our investors. That was, that was a pretty bad punch. Yeah. Oof. Speaker A: I start with that in one way, not just because, you know, not to try and Create the drama of the moment, but because like, I think a lot of the times folks from the outside see these incredible company stories and they don't realize that almost all of them have at least one moment or two like this where things are just insanely hard and you're, you know, maybe not always this, this close to death, but where, where things can go the other way so easily.

And especially with you guys now, you know, this is now a story that feels so exciting and you've gotten to such an incredible level. And so to, to hear, you know, how you made it from, from that point to where you are now, I think will be a lot of fun. But hopefully that sort of sets the scene for, for how these startups happen and how special I think your story really is. To maybe go back a little bit, I feel like what you are building is so informed by who you are and your origins to a, to a significant extent.

Like, you know, you are in a way the customer that you're serving. So Maybe we can start with that. Like, tell us about how you grew up and a little bit of your early days. Speaker B: In hindsight, I'm very glad with the way I grew up. My dad used to work for a telco company that would move him around almost every year to a different city. So I spent my first 11 years in India and within that, 10 different cities and different schools. Almost every year I was in a new school.

I was always a new kid on the block, had always had to be a self-taught person. Had to be really good at just making friends wherever I went. And at age 11, we moved to the UAE. That was an almost alien country to me, completely different culture, a lot of nationalities. The sense of not feeling home when everyone else also does not feel home. I don't know if you know this, but 90% of the UAE is expats. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: I didn't know. 1 in 10 person belongs there, right?

So everyone has identity crises of their own. It's very interesting. Another critical thing that happened is India is usually not the safest city. So parents usually don't let your kids out freely. And UAE, on the other hand, especially Abu Dhabi, is I think by far one of the safest cities in the world. My parents were always okay with me taking public transport, just wandering around at night, even at the age of 11. So that was very liberating. And the third thing was the school that I ended up joining when I moved there actually got founded the year that I joined it.

Oh, wow. And now it seems fateful, but I got to do a lot of culture building, a lot of tradition setting. The first batch was deciding what was this school about, right? What did we do as a student body? What activities did we do? How did we behave as a student body? That was very exciting. Speaker A: That's really interesting. It's funny to even hear someone who was a student say, like, I got to play a big role in building that culture, but it sort of shows how you maybe thought about those things.

Like, when you look back on it, what were the things that you're like, actually, you know, maybe this school was a little different because of the way I interacted? Speaker B: Oh, it was just interesting things, right? We were like, why can't we do student activities the other schools just don't do? So we ended up doing actually, I think, the second TED event of all of UAE in history at my school. So I took the initiative, I contacted TEDx, convinced them that we want to do this, got a small budget from the school, and the school was very open to all of these things because they're like, okay, we don't have a tradition, we need to set these things.

And almost every year there's a TEDx event at our school. It's one in three TEDx events that happens in the UAE. So things like that, we were just very, very fortunate. Speaker A: That's really cool. I remember you telling me about this and I've, you know, since read about it in preparing for this, but your sort of early loves were, were physics, right? Like you were really a, as a young kid watching Carl Sagan and sort of thinking about the outer universe. Like how did, was that just something that really naturally occurred for you?

Speaker B: I think it stemmed from the fact that I had to teach myself a lot of the times. And so internet was always my primary teacher given that I was changing schools, textbooks almost every year and nothing was constant. At one point I'd given up. I was like, okay, fine, I'm just going to constantly move around. I started teaching myself on the internet, and since an early age of 8 or 9, really, really ended up liking thinking about space. At one point, I had the naive thought of, I want to be an astronaut, but then that faded away.

Then I found Carl Sagan, found Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a bunch of other pop scientists talking about this stuff, and it was really fascinating. And by the time I came to grade 8, grade 9, formal physics started getting introduced, and I absolutely love it. I still love math and physics quite a bit. And there was a bit of rebelliousness as well. A lot of Indian culture is centered around you doing either medicine or engineering, and I didn't want to do either of them. So I was like, okay, I'm going to do pure physics.

I'm going to be a physicist. And that's what shaped high school. I ended up working with the local university. There was an NYU chapter in Abu Dhabi, NYUAD, large university. I ended up getting introduced to the physics head of department there. So all through high school, he mentored me, coached me. I would work with him over the weekends. So there's a lot of that. Yeah. Speaker A: So really serious in a way, like for, for that age, you really were absolutely pursuing it aggressively. I think every parent would be thrilled if their teenager's rebelliousness was, hey, I really want to spend a lot of time on physics.

That's so cool. Where does your competitiveness come from? Because that's one of— if I think about you and knowing you at least a little bit before this, you're such a competitive person and really throughout your life you've done a lot of things at an intense level, right? Like Olympiads, you know, this physics aspect, sport. I think also, like, is that something that is just always— Speaker A: So really serious in a way, like for, for that age, you really were absolutely pursuing it aggressively. I think every parent would be thrilled if their teenager's rebelliousness was, hey, I really want to spend a lot of time on physics.

That's so cool. Where does your competitiveness come from? Because that's one of— if I think about you and knowing you at least a little bit before this, you're such a competitive person and really throughout your life you've done a lot of things at an intense level, right? Like Olympiads, you know, this physics aspect, sport. I think also, like, is that something that is just always— Speaker B: I ask myself quite a bit, right? My mom still thinks this is my biggest flaw. Two things: I am hypercompetitive and I don't enjoy victories.

I just move on to the next thing. My team also complains quite a bit that I don't appreciate them. Speaker A: Not a celebrator. Speaker B: Not a celebrator. But I think a part of it is also that you have some role models. And for me, that was my dad. He achieved quite a bit in his life from where he came from and what he ended up doing. And I always want to do better than him. And I saw him try multiple times. He was an entrepreneur a couple of times, failed, but kept going at it.

That was, I think, a large part of it. But I think it was just inherent that, that I don't like losing. Speaker A: Fast forward a little bit. You, you go to Stanford and you, you go there to study physics. And the idea at that point, I think in your mind was still like, I want to be a great physicist. Speaker B: I mean, my mom wanted me to study computer science because that was more commercial and you can get a job afterwards. She was like, what are you going to do with a physics degree?

No, but it was very much to become a physicist. Yes. Speaker B: I mean, my mom wanted me to study computer science because that was more commercial and you can get a job afterwards. She was like, what are you going to do with a physics degree? No, but it was very much to become a physicist. Yes. Speaker A: And so what was the sort of journey from going in with that idea to, hey, actually, my life path is going to be as a builder, as an entrepreneur? Speaker B: It was not straightforward.

I took the high-level physics classes as a freshman, Physics 60, That's the most challenging class you can take as a freshman. Was doing good. I mean, we're still struggling a bit because everyone around you was struggling, but yeah, I was getting through it and I came across a couple of people, one of them who was taking directly your two classes and one of them who was taking grad classes who was still freshman and they were not struggling. And I think that was sort of an understanding that there's a certain IQ level that you need to become great.

And my whole idea with physics, I used to keep joking with my parents, but I wanted to be the Lucasian Professor of Cambridge. And that was a position that Isaac Newton once held. And I sort of realized that, yes, I can do good. There was one more incident actually. While this was happening, I ended up working with a group called DESI. It was a dark energy spectrometer instrument group. They were doing some research on how dark energy models evolve. And it was not groundbreaking work. It was just running some Python scripts, doing data analysis and micro-optimizations on some models that someone had theorized a while ago.

And I realized that a large chunk of this community, A, does not go into physics research. They all go into quant or finance. Of the ones that actually go into it, 80% of them don't end up doing groundbreaking work. And I realized I'm not going to make it to the top 10%. If that was not going to be the case, that's not exciting. Speaker A: Yeah, that's so interesting. When you think about sort of the physicists that maybe you were most excited about or interested in, you obviously mentioned Newton as sort of, you know, maybe on the Mount Rushmore of that industry or that field rather.

Like, were there particular people that you just found massively interesting for whatever reason? Speaker B: I was really a fanboy for Leonard Susskind. He was, I mean, he's still one of the best physicists to come out of 21st century. He was a professor at Stanford. I got to see him quite a bit. I don't think he remembers me, but he was one person I was really looking forward to spending time with. But he was one of God knows how many that tried to get there. Speaker A: I can't help myself because I'm just curious about this stuff.

Like, what was it about Susskind that, you know, you were like, this guy, you know, really has some way of thinking about things or some theory or whatever it is that is magnetic to me. Speaker B: So he was at that time thinking about gravitational waves and how graviton can have a different answer to general relativity. And he was really challenging status quo. And I still remember, like, when we were— he had this thing called Halo Theory. When we were in high school and undergrad, that was not widely accepted, and it was still an outlier theory.

And the last 4 years, it's become widely accepted, and he's gotten a lot of prominence for it. It was just that he's like, I believe this. This is the only way possible. A second thing for me was he was really close to Feynman. He was one of his best friends, and he had a lot of similarities to the way they thought, the way that they taught other people. They probed them to think deeper, think of first principles. Speaker A: That's really fascinating. I just for the first time this year read, what is it?

I think it's called You Must Be Joking with Richard Feynman. It's sort of a story of his life. You Must Be Joking with Feynman. It was one of the most colorful characters that you can ever imagine. And in some ways, look, he was obviously an amazing, uh, physicist, but in many ways I read that book and saw so many traits that you see with great founders, like, you know, this total almost playfulness with problem solving and finding all these shortcuts to things and just, you know, rule breaking in all these ways.

Um, anyway, so it's really interesting to hear about that relationship with Siskind. And so then, you know, you're, you're sort of going through this moment of realizing the life path I'm on isn't going to get me where I hope to go. And then COVID sort of interrupts things. Is that roughly the right timing? Speaker B: It's about around this time. So COVID happened literally freshman year, end of winter quarter for me. So I was 6 months into my college journey. COVID happens and you get sent back home. I go back to Abu Dhabi.

I do this, continue this physics research over the summer as well. And by the end of it, I'm like, yeah, this is not going to be super exciting for me. I decide to take a year off because I didn't want to do online college. Yeah, I did not think it was worth wasting one year of college doing online course studies because at the end of the day, college experience is about being with people and learning from each other. And almost all of my friend group decided we're going to take a year off and I was still trying to figure out what to do.

One of the things that was something to keep myself busy was continuing on the nonprofit that I started in high school. It's called Club Rise. But like when I'd gone to Stanford, I sort of stopped working on it. So I picked it up again and started working on this interesting problem statement of how do you reduce wastage of expired consumer goods. And while doing that, I ended up turning that entire project into a for-profit company. Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Okay. You succeeded in the OpenAI transmutation from nonprofit to for-profit. Speaker B: Yeah, it just felt like an interesting opportunity.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: That you can commercialize as well. So I moved back to India This was my first time actually going to India for anything other than meeting my grandparents after I'd moved to UAE. I found a co-founder through my cousin. I asked him, who's the smartest person you know? He pointed me to someone and we both hit it off. We moved into this house in Delhi and started building from there. So that was the first actual experience with tinkering, with building anything tech-related or product. Speaker A: Oh, okay.

Well, fascinating. I hadn't realized that. Also, probably you know, I always think there's almost a seminal moment of earning your first dollar over the internet or, you know, through a business that, you know, so that was sort of this moment for you in a way. And so what was the nonprofit version? And then what was the sort of for-profit? Speaker B: So the problem statement was essentially that, um, a lot of consumer goods companies actually don't sell their goods to supermarkets. They rent shelf space. So that means that I am getting a right to put I guess, 100 cans of my milk on the Waitrose shelves.

And if those milk go unsold and they're about to expire, I have to pick them off the shelf and then dispose them. Now that means that if a milk carton is going to expire tomorrow, there's almost zero chance that someone's going to buy that off the shelf. But at the same time, there are a lot of industries that can consume that milk on the same day. That is primarily the hotels, restaurants, café, horeca industry. And we were like, okay, fine. I mean, there's a tremendous added cost. I mean, there's obviously revenue lost, but there's added cost for them to transport these goods and then dispose them.

What if we can connect these near-expired products to the horeca industry and get them to buy these goods at a cheaper cost and still fantastic, all fine goods, right? So that's what we started with. It was just a way to reduce wastage in the city. And while we were doing it, we realized that a lot of restaurants just wanted to buy things in bulk. They were like, oh yeah, this is fantastic. So the parallel thought over there was if we can get economies of scale with these items like butter sticks that people want to buy or rice packets, what if like communities of people want to buy in bulk?

We're essentially cutting out the retailer here, so they're getting it for cheaper. So the idea was that India actually has hundreds of thousands of these gated societies where people live in apartment complexes and those apartment complexes have like 500 to 1000 family members living in there. If all of them buy groceries individually, if they were able to directly buy from manufacturers or producers, they would be able to cut out middlemen and then save 20 to 30%. The second thing is also that India has a high population of homemakers or wives that don't work that are still quite entrepreneurial.

So companies like Amway, which is a German brand, have found a lot of success doing sort of distribution through these homemakers. And we're like, okay, fine, if we can find 1 or 2 women in these societies that want to just distribute these goods, all of them collectively save 20-30% on their bills, that could be an interesting model. So that's what we were building. So it's called Grosami, grocery and ami, the French word for friend. We started doing this, we started finding these cloud supermarkets within these societies, found entrepreneurial women that would do the distribution.

We got a lot of the brands onboarded and plus local producers. That wanted to sell directly. It was a good start. Speaker A: Well, really interesting. I love hearing these early stories of what people build before maybe the thing that hopefully they spend their life on or the next couple decades on. So with Grosso Me, what was the sort of close-up to that story? Did you reach a point where you thought, I can't be as ambitious as I want to with this? Speaker B: So there's two things. I liked working on it, but I did not think that FMCG was going to be my life's work.

Obviously it was an interesting problem statement. It was getting me through this COVID gap here. I was learning a lot. I didn't know what a P&L was before I even started GrossMe. I didn't know anything about business really. The crucial moment over here was my co-founder had to leave because of some family emergency and he was like, I cannot not earn. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: So he went back and got a job at Adobe and I was like, fine, I'm not going to do this alone. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: So I moved back to Abu Dhabi.

Got a couple of internships, and that was the end of it. Speaker A: Okay. And then you go back to Stanford with the idea of, hey, I'm going to go sort of network, but really I'm on the lookout for my next company. Speaker B: I think that was, that was pretty clear that I liked doing this. I had one of my best times of my life just building GrowSumi. And I think it was just the fact that you could do things very quickly. Your feedback loops were very short. You could find consumer fit if you worked hard enough.

And it felt like something that was entirely in your control. And I was like, this is a game that I can definitely play. So yeah, the idea was definitely to try to see what happens. And the couple of internships that I tried doing were also in that area. I tried an investment banking internship, hated it. Speaker A: Yeah, I can see you must have gone nuts. Speaker A: Yeah, I can see you must have gone nuts. Speaker B: Yeah. And I tried a VC internship and I was sitting there just like telling myself, I can build this.

Like, why am I sitting on the other side of the table? But yeah. Speaker A: Interesting. Um, it's funny to me that the fast feedback loops, in many ways it feels like if you had continued in physics, your life would have been like some of the slowest feedback loops possible, right? So you're really built for, for this environment. And so then you start this new company, which is initially called Vants. What's the, what's the sort of moment of deciding to drop out for the second time and go in on this new idea?

Speaker B: So this is actually a story that not a lot of people know, but, uh, I started working on Vants, um, In the summer that I went back after Grossmere, right? So John, who was my freshman year roommate at Stanford, he came to Abu Dhabi to spend time with me. He's like, oh yeah, Parth, we hang out over the summer. And I was interning at this VC firm called Churuq, and both of us were just tinkering out with ideas. He's like, Parth, let's start a crypto hedge fund. I'm like, I don't want to do a crypto hedge fund.

And so we were tinkering out with this idea of pay now, buy later. And what this meant was Our hypothesis was very simple. It was actually based on the Starbucks gift card. I don't know if you know this, but Starbucks actually has a tremendous amount of capital under their belt. Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great bank. Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great bank. Speaker A: Yeah, I wrote a piece on this because I became fascinated with the fact that Starbucks is low-key a really good bank. Speaker B: Correct. It is, right?

The breakage fees that they're able to earn on that and the interest on the AUM, it's insane. And we were like, why can't small businesses also do something like this? 'Cause an average individual interacts with 5 or 6 businesses that they have a very high affinity with. So the salon that I go to is the salon I'm gonna go to for the next 2 years. I don't change my hair salons every, every week, right? So our idea was, what if we enabled small businesses to be able to take capital from their customers upfront and then promise them goods or services for later?

And the good thing is that with these goods and services that they're promising them later, maybe additional, for example, let's say, I can buy 12 haircuts for the price of 11. The 12th haircut, the cost of that haircut is significantly lower than the revenue that you earn. So our actual cost on the entire capital upfront is very, very low. Same with coffee, right? Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great bank. Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great bank. Speaker A: Yeah, I wrote a piece on this because I became fascinated with the fact that Starbucks is low-key a really good bank.

Speaker B: Correct. It is, right? The breakage fees that they're able to earn on that and the interest on the AUM, it's insane. And we were like, why can't small businesses also do something like this? 'Cause an average individual interacts with 5 or 6 businesses that they have a very high affinity with. So the salon that I go to is the salon I'm gonna go to for the next 2 years. I don't change my hair salons every, every week, right? So our idea was, what if we enabled small businesses to be able to take capital from their customers upfront and then promise them goods or services for later?

And the good thing is that with these goods and services that they're promising them later, maybe additional, for example, let's say, I can buy 12 haircuts for the price of 11. The 12th haircut, the cost of that haircut is significantly lower than the revenue that you earn. So our actual cost on the entire capital upfront is very, very low. Same with coffee, right? Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Coffee does not cost you $5. It costs you half a dollar. Speaker A: Totally. Speaker B: For the customer, it feels like a lot of reward.

For you, the cost is way less. So this is what we started tinkering around with. We went back to San Diego. I dropped out of this internship. I was like, I need to go. This is not going to work out for me. So we went back to San Diego. We got a few businesses onboarded. And this is like 20, 25 days before school was going to start. We got a nail salon on board, we got a boba shop on board, and a few other businesses. We built a hacky solution and we applied to YC on a whim.

Like, let's see what happens. Yeah, we went back to college, um, and we're still tinkering over this idea of what it means to get capital early for businesses and how are the ways that they can unlock, uh, capital without going to traditional equity or debt, uh, processes. So we're still thinking about that. And then we get a call from YC, an email from YC for an interview. And that was, I think, the second crucial moment where we had to decide, do we do this or do we not? Speaker A: Yeah.

Is this a side project or is this something we're really going to spend some time on? Speaker B: Correct. We told YC that we were still tinkering around with this idea. We don't know if it's true. We don't know if it's going to scale. They're like, that's fine, come interview with us. We interviewed with them, they accepted us, and we decided we're going to go do this. And we were still debating, uh, where, where to build this, what to build. And we ended up settling on India. And he was very fascinated with India.

I'd just come back from India and I was like, yeah, it's a great place to build. So we decided that we'll tinker our model a little bit. We realized that 10% plus of India's economy is software exports, and a lot of these companies don't get venture equity, right? It's a top 0.1% of companies that get venture equity. And almost all of these companies, they have no access to debt because In India, if you don't have tangible assets, you're not going to get bank debt. So a lot of these companies that have contracted revenue are not able to access capital upfront.

So what if you were able to underwrite their ARR, give them capital, and then take ownership of their receivables, package that, and then sell it upstream to institutional investors? Speaker A: It's really interesting because you're, you're in many ways in the same problem space and solving sort of the same problem, but you went from How do I help people get a free extra boba and give this boba shop in San Diego extra working capital to Indian SaaS? So to sort of dig into that, like, what was the decision around, hey, actually India is the right place to build?

Was that sort of more intuitive or did you guys sort of think about running down all of these scenarios? Speaker B: No, I think at that point it was intuitive. I think John and I got better at making decision framing processes. I think it was just like, hey, where are we going to do this thing? And we're like, why not go to India? It's one of the most booming economies. And there was a promise of SaaS was very big in India, had a booming SaaS economy. We'll go do that. The process of shifting from SMEs to this was essentially, did we want to run an ops company or no?

Because this would be very, very ops heavy. And we both said, we're not the people that will do fantastic ops business. Speaker A: We're going to go hand to hand to every salon. Speaker B: And yeah, it doesn't work. You have to get thousands of SMEs over here, you have to get a few hundred companies on board to build a really large lending book. And the second thing was if you do the first model, you're not actually lending, you just get a SaaS fee. Whereas if you do your lending here, you create an AUM, you can earn way more transaction fees.

So that was the second idea. Speaker A: I think it's roughly around this point that you meet our mutual friends, the Hummingbird folks, who, as we both know at this point, have like a very distinctive and unique way of looking at venture. And, you know, as I've heard the story from parts from you, parts from them, they were sort of pretty upfront with you. They were like, hey, we're not so crazy about this idea. Is that right? Speaker B: Well, they didn't say it back then. Okay. They did. They did say after we told them that we don't think it's going to work out.

So I'll tell you the timeline, right? So we finish off this term at Stanford in December of 2021. We moved to Bombay in January of 2022 and we start working on this idea. The YC batch starts then, and we end up meeting them in February. What we managed to do within those 45 days is actually get operations off the ground and give 5 loans out as well. So we got lending books ready, we got partnerships done, we got a legal structure set up, we did some BD, and we actually found 5 companies that were worth giving capital to.

And that's when we got connected to Akshay. At that point, we went through the process, we met Bharan, Farhad, the partners at Hummingbird, fantastic folks, and they decided to invest in us. A small check on the entire seed round. And a month later, still in the YC batch, we told them that, hey, we've realized some ground truth that we didn't know before, which is there's a certain amount of businesses that have contracted revenue, but a vast majority of businesses are actually dev shops. So there's no contractual revenue here. You can still do lending, but it's not going to be back of some receivables, and hence you're not going to be able to package it, you're not going to be able to sell it off upstream.

So you're just a lending company. And, uh, both of us were not super excited. And they're like, okay, we know that. And they asked us, what are you going to do next? We're like, we don't know. And they still gave us a second part of the seed round. That was the story. Speaker A: Well, as you know, they, they are indexing so much on the person. It's always hard to sort of introspect about yourself, but as they would tell it, they're, they're looking for truly the top basis point in terms of a builder.

What do you think they saw in you very early in your career? And, you know, you were probably a bit more raw in the way that you were thinking about a business? Like, what were the traits that maybe stuck out? Speaker B: I think at that point, the only things that internalized about building a company was you needed to move quick and you need to find, again, the top basis point of talent. Speaker A: You had already figured that part out, that you needed to be really strong on the talent lens.

Speaker B: Correct. And a part of that was YC. YC really, really like, I guess a couple of conversations, but they really nailed down the fact that you should be anal about who you have in the team and who you don't have in the team. The worst person on your team dictates your working style and culture, right? And I think that's what Hummingbird and we saw eye to eye on. And they were like, okay, that's fantastic. We were also able to build a very strong team. By the way, this other person who was my co-founder at Grosami.

Yeah. Was our second hire. Oh, wow. He's our head of engineering today. Speaker A: No kidding. Yeah, I had that thought in my head. I'm like, I hope that guy came, came back somewhere. Okay, great. Speaker B: The first person we hired was a lawyer. He was a second person. And he scaled very well. He's building the entire engineering team at Aspera now. Speaker A: Wow. So you had great taste even back then. The heuristic of asking your cousin who's the smartest person you know is not a bad way to find out.

Speaker B: Well, he was an engineer himself. He was at a top university. Yeah, yeah, totally. You— that was a little bit of self-selection, but yeah. Speaker A: Wow. So you had great taste even back then. The heuristic of asking your cousin who's the smartest person you know is not a bad way to find out. Speaker B: Well, he was an engineer himself. He was at a top university. Yeah, yeah, totally. You— that was a little bit of self-selection, but yeah. Speaker A: Yeah, it depends on the cousin. And so you realize that the current version of Vants at that point was not going to be the right thing.

And you'll help me figure out exactly what the sort of our order of operations was. But there's a certain point at which I remember you telling me that you almost ran like a series of sprints with your team to try and find like, hey, we don't have the right idea any, anymore, we think, but we're not gonna just give up. So we need to find some sort of structure to ideate, which I think is really— so many founders hit that point where they realize the thing they wanted to do is not working.

And I think it's really hard to build a structure for yourself to get to that point of discovery. So maybe you can, Tell me a little bit about how you, how you got through that. Speaker B: Give credit where it's due. We came across this conversation of the Zip founder, the procure-to-pay. Speaker A: Oh yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. And he talked about how he came up with the Zip idea and he had this 10-point checklist on what you should consider in building a business. Obviously it was not entirely that. That was a starting point of how we realized that we should have a structured process as we're going through this because we have money in the bank, we have some fantastic engineers that we've hired, and we can definitely think about what to do.

What we would do is come up with problem spaces or revenue pools that we wanted to eye, think about those industries, speak to people in those industries, and understand what problem statements look like. So you're speaking to hedge fund managers, engineers that work at hedge funds, crypto traders, finance teams. We're checking out the CFO stack. We're looking at personal finance across Nigeria, US, Eastern Europe, all across, right? So we're exploring ideas throughout, and whatever we used to narrow down, we would try to build an MVP very, very quickly and then put it in the hands of people either through an Excel sheet or a WhatsApp chat or a janky app on Android.

And that was a process. And doing that, our team was very engaged because they were like, okay, we're part of this process. We're not sitting down because you've hired some great people, 7 or 8 of them, and suddenly telling them that the company that they took the risk on. Yeah, it's not, not doing anything is very daunting, right? And so if they don't get work or they don't get intellectual stimulation, it's easy for them to decide to leave. So that was very important. And that's the process we ended up going through.

Speaker A: How long was sort of each of those sprints? Did you think about them within a certain duration? Speaker B: I think we ran some of them parallelly as well. 2 to 4 weeks. For example, one of them was almost all of Genotaid in India happens through physical checks and penetration of digital payments in P2P payments is very high. And P2M is very high, peer-to-merchant. But merchant-to-merchant is almost always checks. And we were thinking, what is a way for us to digitize checks? And we went ahead and built a product and we actually took it out to thousands of merchants and we tried, we shipped our team to different remote parts of India and tried to see if it works.

Everyone enjoyed the process, but we realized that there's this one key thing missing, which is recourse. Everyone loves checks because they can give credit with great recourse. So you can post that checks. So I as a business can write a check for you that is dated 15 days from now, and I get credit with that by not paying you right now. But then you also have surety that I can always cash this. That was the fundamental feature that it's very hard to replicate with digital products. Speaker C: This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust.

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It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to com/generalist and check it out. Speaker A: Okay, so let's go back to where we started actually this conversation, which is You wake up, it's, uh, you're in Bangalore, your co-founder's gone, and you have an investor saying, hey, what the hell's going on? Like, apparently you're returning the money. Like, take us from there to maybe not where we are now, but to, you know, landing on, on this.

Speaker B: So I called one of my friends, Mehul. He's a fantastic guy. He's, I mean, one of the reasons that we ended up doing well is because he was my coach and therapist. Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome. Speaker B: He's a YC founder as well. So He's like, "Pa, just get a lawyer. I mean, that's the first thing you should do." And I was glad that that was the first thing that I did. He told me, "Okay, in front of you, what are options? Can investors actually ask you for the money back legally?"

And he's like, "They don't, but if you want, you can return it." And that gave me at least a sense of footing that, okay, it's my battle to play here, and then I decide how to play my cards. The second thing I did is I was very candid with my team. I spoke with them individually, told them what had happened. And told them, hey man, it's completely okay if you want to leave. I'll make sure that you get a decent severance and you are able to find a new job. Thankfully, all of them stayed back and not a single person left us from that moment till another 3 months before we decided what we were actually going to do.

Speaker A: And 3 months between that moment and figuring it out? Speaker B: Oh yeah. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: Wow. Speaker A: That's a long time. Speaker B: Well, 2 and a half. Yeah. I think this happened in July, end of July, early August. And we decided what we're going to do in October. And then we ended up launching Aspora's first product in December. Speaker A: Yeah, not a long time in terms of, you know, no judgment, more just like to keep people, to manage to retain people during that time.

Yeah. Speaker B: Well, 2 and a half. Yeah. I think this happened in July, end of July, early August. And we decided what we're going to do in October. And then we ended up launching Aspora's first product in December. Speaker A: Yeah, not a long time in terms of, you know, no judgment, more just like to keep people, to manage to retain people during that time. Yeah. Speaker B: So this is happening January, moved to Bangalore till December, the first version of Aspora that came out. And then I spoke to investors.

I told them, hey guys, this is what's happened. This was a background. This is what we're trying to do. The truth is I don't want to return the money. I will still want to continue building. I spoke to them a day after all of this happened because I wanted to settle down. Fundamental question I asked myself is, if Aspora, or at that point Vance, shuts down, what will I do? And the answer was, I'll start another company. Yeah. And then probably in financial services because I really, really liked it. I was like, okay, fine, let's just do this.

Spoke to them. They were like, but how are you going to run this company alone? Uh, had to convince them that, hey, we can still figure this out. I'm going to be a solo founder. These are the XYZ things I will have to do as a solo founder to still be successful. Told them the team is still behind me. They spoke to the team. They're like, yeah, yeah, your team is still behind you. And yeah, from there, 3 things we did. We were trying to figure out what product to build.

We were still continuing iterating. We had this small legal battle with the co-founder, with John, trying to figure out how do we do severance correctly and can we actually do this? Because we were both co-CEOs, we both had a say on what to do with the capital. There was a weird position and investors were on a safe note, so they had absolutely no say. And the third one was just keeping myself sane and saying that you can still do this. Speaker A: How did you do that? Speaker B: Just like speaking to my parents and I guess my friend Mehul.

That was the only way. And they were like, yeah, probably you'll figure it out. Speaker A: You said you had made this list of sort of here's XYZ of things I need to do as a solo founder that I maybe didn't need to do before. What was sort of mentally on that list? And as you think of it now, I'm curious how you think about are you built to be a solo founder? Was that like actually the right path for you? Speaker B: I don't think anyone should be a solo founder.

I definitely think that you should. It's just easier, like when you have people around you that are in the same boat as you, because as the company scales, your employees start taking up functions, you hire over them, and then the company grows and there's no one next to you, right? It becomes quite lonely. Having a co-founder is always best. But what I realized back then, the biggest failure point for me would be thinking I was right and having no one that had the authority to challenge me. So the biggest thing that I had to do was create a culture where everyone can speak their minds, everyone can be challenged, especially me, because I'm going to say 40 to 50% things that are just not going to be the right ideas or right decisions.

And someone had to be there to check me as well, because with a co-founder, there's always, always brutal honesty. With employees, less so. And especially if you scale. So that's something that I was very candid with the team and sort of inculcated that up to today. Speaker A: How did you get folks to feel comfortable doing that? Because there's one, you know, it's sort of the classic thing of your boss says, hey, I love feedback, but there's, you know, an internal block maybe of giving that someone. Speaker B: I think not having a knee-jerk reaction to feedback.

I mean, like just taking it well, right? Showing them that you care about it. Also, my ex-co-founder had a lot to do with it because he was comfortable and we were friends and he would call me out in like meetings and be like, that is a stupid idea. Speaker A: How did you get folks to feel comfortable doing that? Because there's one, you know, it's sort of the classic thing of your boss says, hey, I love feedback, but there's, you know, an internal block maybe of giving that someone. Speaker B: I think not having a knee-jerk reaction to feedback.

I mean, like just taking it well, right? Showing them that you care about it. Also, my ex-co-founder had a lot to do with it because he was comfortable and we were friends and he would call me out in like meetings and be like, that is a stupid idea. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: So when you see people doing it and you're okay with it, And that's when it happened. Speaker A: You sort of— people get comfortable with that behavior. Speaker B: It's hard to keep doing that. As I'm skating, I'm realizing I'm losing a little bit of it.

Yeah, but that's really, really important. Speaker A: Maybe some of the folks that have been there long enough, they now feel more comfortable. Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker A: But the new folks are sort of— as you, as you sort of scale and scale, it maybe becomes harder, right? So after that moment, there's this 3-month period. When is the moment that you sort of land on the idea for Aspora that, that you were like, hey, this, this could really work? Speaker B: I think it was not one conversation, it was a series of conversations.

We were still trying to do this thing, right, where we were speaking to people in different industries, trying to understand their business context or professional context as well as their personal lives. And we realized that a good chunk of people that we were speaking to turned out to be immigrants that moved from one country to another 3 to 10 years ago. And one common thing they mentioned was it was hard for them to manage finance across borders. And there are 3 things to it, right? Or 4. It was very hard to manage multiple accounts.

Like everywhere I'm going, I'm opening new accounts. I don't remember passwords and it's just, I don't know where my money is. Second was taxation is bloody complicated. I don't know where am I supposed to pay which tax. Any tax consultant that I hire does not know anything about the other country. So it's very hard. Third is I don't know how to deploy capital, wealth, how do I manage it? And the fourth was the payments are still very hard. And that became a repeated pattern and we kept seeing it again and again, we realize that companies like Remitly and Wise that are in this space.

Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: But they don't really solve banking for you as a global consumer, right? They only solve payments. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Which is an important piece. But I would have naturally assumed that the next step would have been, well, we'll solve entire banking for you. I know Wise in 2018, 2019 rebranded from TransferWise to Wise. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: To do that. But the fundamental flaw for them was that they were spread too thin between multiple diasporas. Or multiple immigrants, groups, or ICPs, customer personas, that would be very hard for them to go deep because every person needed a different solution.

And then we realized that, okay, we have something at our hand here. We ended up doing a bunch of research, realized there's a power law of number of countries where immigrants come from and the number of countries that they go to. It's about 8 and 8, the largest developing countries to largest developed countries. So you don't really need to do 200 to 200 mapping. It's about 7 to 7, 8 to 8, and you can capture a large portion of the revenue pools here. And then we started digging into, well, NRI diaspora, and the first victim was my dad and his friends and people that I knew.

Speaker A: And NRI, just for people, is non-resident Indian. Speaker B: Correct. These are people that have left India, are living outside, and they can either have an Indian passport or a foreign passport at that point. Yeah. And so UAE is filled with them, right? So UAE has 10 million population, 3 million of who are NRIs. And I realized this problem was way closer to home than I realized. And it was structural as well, right? So as you move as an immigrant from one country to another, the country that you move to is not great with banking new immigrants in general.

They don't know how to assimilate you with credit, with banks, with wealth. And also you're lost as to what to do. And the second is the country that you're moving from is not fantastic with banking their diaspora. And that's primarily because almost everyone spent time on, in the last 10 years of fintech evolution, these largest immigrant, these largest developing countries on their local populations. For example, India has a billion and a half people that they build payment infrastructure for. They didn't think what it would be for NRIs. So it's going slightly deeper into NRIs.

NRIs are required to have a special bank account. It's called a non-resident account, uh, because they have different tax treatments for you. There are some benefits, and the government wants to be clear about what is foreign money, what is not. Capital controls. And this account opening process is 45 days. As a result, 60 to 70% NRIs globally don't have access to this account. And without this account, you can't invest in India, you can't take credit. But then everyone does. They use their mother's account, their brother's account. So there's a lot of workarounds to this.

But the entire financial ecosystem was broken. And the second thing is, this is despite them disproportionately contributing to the financial services landscape. So the number that we ended up concluding was close to one-third of all of India's consumer deposits, which is about $1 trillion, comes from the diaspora. So 1% of the population contributes to 30% of deposits. And this was consistent across the diaspora. It was the same for Filipinos, it was the same for Nigerians, Chinese, that they wanted to bank back home. There's a sense of nostalgia, growing economies, and it's just not easy.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so interesting. There's these sort of structural things and just to sort of recap it to make sure I'm, I'm, you know, understanding it well enough and readers or listeners are understanding it well enough. It's like some— an Indian person moves to the UAE. The UAE doesn't really know what credit that person should have or, you know, what sort of banking, how they should fit into the existing banking system. But India has sort of not washed their hands of them, but it's sort of like, hey, you have to fit into this very specific set of capital controls, this, this bank account.

And as a result, folks are, are finding these, these back doors or side doors of saying, hey, I'm going to invest in real estate through my mom's account, or I'm going to send money through this way. And so you've sort of took as a problem statement building for this diaspora, this NRI group that is, you know, asymmetric in terms of its actual size, but it's sort of financial size. When did the realization that sort of stablecoin should be a really important part of that solution come into it? Speaker B: I think we tinkered around with the idea of stablecoins very early on, right?

So we launched our first product in December of 2022. We got our first users around January of 2023. And around that time we were thinking about stablecoins, but we took a call against it because we were like, oh, regulations aren't clear. We don't know if this is actually a way that we should go about things. And we knew there were a couple of benefits of using it. We said, okay, fine, it's not clear. At that time we were actually exploring gold-based settlements as well. But okay, fine, we can buy digital gold in one country, sell in another, and that's where we can settle.

Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: So it was not a common place to think about stablecoins. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Speaker B: So we tried a couple of things. We were like, we don't know if people are doing this. So we shoved that idea. When it really became important and pressing for us to think about this was when in March of 2023 our volumes were going up and our cash balance was going down because we're still burning money as a company. And to do settlements to a foreign country, you need some working capital in that country because you're buying FX ahead.

Banks in India only work 8 hours on weekdays. So if you want to do instant settlements for your customers, you need to buy capital, buy INR, and then store it in that country. So you need some working capital. And we were deploying our equity money over there. And as our volumes are growing and our cash balance is coming down, it was like a fatal pinch and we're like, we have to do something. You can have constant purchase of INR throughout the day and throughout the weekends. So your working capital requirements went from X to 0.2X.

Wow. Wow. Speaker A: That's really interesting. To give folks sort of a sense of the scale here and maybe the idea of like what, you know, how to wrap their heads around the product, how do you sort of pitch Espora today and what is— what are the sort of scale we're talking about? Speaker B: So today, Espora in its current form lets you send money from, well, I guess 5 developed countries back to India and also pay your bills back home. They have electricity, utility, my credit card payments or mobile recharges.

We are processing close to half a billion dollars of volume every month. That's close to 4.5% of the inward remittances that India receives every year, and that's primarily from two countries. We've recently gone live with Europe and the US as well, and those are scaling markets, and we have a few other countries that we're taking live. But what is exciting is our roadmap. So how I pitch to new NRIs is like, we will be your primary bank across the two countries that you live in. You don't need any other financial institution after us, and that's because we give you an NRI bank account back in India, we give you a GBP bank account here, they work seamlessly with each other.

You have one card that you can use across the world, zero forex fees, and we allow you to invest in both of these countries. Obviously that is a roadmap and we're going to be launching these over the next 6 to 9 months. But that's what we're super excited about. Speaker A: And in terms of remittances, you know, you say maybe 5% of inflows. India is, as I understand, the biggest remittance economy in the world. Right. And also, I'm sure you know this, but there was a report this week talking about crypto adoption globally, you know, and there's different ways they sort of measure that, but across a number of different metrics, India is number one.

Uh, and so it really is, is obviously so inherent to who you are and your story. You were an NRI, right? You are an NRI, but also there's such sort of analytical reasons why this really makes sense. It feels like— Speaker B: Absolutely. I agree with you. Speaker A: One thing that, that I'm interested in is in a way, I don't think— I can't think of another neobank or financial story that has framed themselves the way that you guys do. You know, there are obviously lots of global fintechs, but not one that says like, hey, we're actually for diasporas.

Like, that's sort of, you know, in our DNA in some way. And it, you know, raises the question for me of why is that the right framing for this? And is there sort of enough similarity across Indian diaspora, Pakistani diaspora, you know, Turkish, whatever you want to pick, um, for that to be like a meaningful unifying characteristic? Speaker B: I'll tell you the truth behind it, right? Some of it is obviously, uh, current and present branding. When we started the saw, our goal was today finances across borders are broken, and it's not just for consumers, it's not just for diaspora, anyone that has any use cases around sending money between countries and managing multiple currencies.

And that's SMEs, freelancers, corporates. And the plumbing itself is broken between these countries. Um, and our idea with Aspora was, well, it's a design problem, right? You're able to now with Aspora get licenses and regulatory infrastructure in 8 of the largest economies in the world. But then as you expand diaspora, also 8 of the largest developing countries in the world. And once you build this plumbing, you have a platform that you can do infrastructure plays on, you can do B2B banking plays on, consumer banking plays on. And that's really the goal, right?

So while diaspora banking is our short-term and what we're building on the consumer aspect of it, we've already started building our infrastructure. We already allow other businesses to use our rails to send money to India. We've launched a couple of other countries there, but the goal is evolving Aspora into a global bank. Yeah, that anyone can use, uh, because we're building all of this infrastructure and finding the best, uh, way to move money and information. Speaker B: I'll tell you the truth behind it, right? Some of it is obviously, uh, current and present branding.

When we started the saw, our goal was today finances across borders are broken, and it's not just for consumers, it's not just for diaspora, anyone that has any use cases around sending money between countries and managing multiple currencies. And that's SMEs, freelancers, corporates. And the plumbing itself is broken between these countries. Um, and our idea with Aspora was, well, it's a design problem, right? You're able to now with Aspora get licenses and regulatory infrastructure in 8 of the largest economies in the world. But then as you expand diaspora, also 8 of the largest developing countries in the world.

And once you build this plumbing, you have a platform that you can do infrastructure plays on, you can do B2B banking plays on, consumer banking plays on. And that's really the goal, right? So while diaspora banking is our short-term and what we're building on the consumer aspect of it, we've already started building our infrastructure. We already allow other businesses to use our rails to send money to India. We've launched a couple of other countries there, but the goal is evolving Aspora into a global bank. Yeah, that anyone can use, uh, because we're building all of this infrastructure and finding the best, uh, way to move money and information.

Speaker A: And how do you think about taking the right steps towards that? Because, you know, if you're saying global infrastructure and the application layer, you could go in any number of directions, right? Speaker B: Correct. So this is the point where it's really important to understand where to allocate capital. And the approach we've taken so far is be commercial first, figure out, uh, what allows you to get the most revenue, the most relevant users, what can allow you to cross-sell from there on, how can you build synergies. The reason we chose Philippines as the next diaspora is because we ended up getting licensed in the US and there's a very high concentration of Philippines in the US.

And we're like, okay, fine, that's— and we decided to wait till we went to the US to launch Philippines. But the idea is try to chase revenue pools, try to chase adjacencies to your current business models, and at the same time keep building infrastructure. Speaker A: And how do you think about taking the right steps towards that? Because, you know, if you're saying global infrastructure and the application layer, you could go in any number of directions, right? Speaker B: Correct. So this is the point where it's really important to understand where to allocate capital.

And the approach we've taken so far is be commercial first, figure out, uh, what allows you to get the most revenue, the most relevant users, what can allow you to cross-sell from there on, how can you build synergies. The reason we chose Philippines as the next diaspora is because we ended up getting licensed in the US and there's a very high concentration of Philippines in the US. And we're like, okay, fine, that's— and we decided to wait till we went to the US to launch Philippines. But the idea is try to chase revenue pools, try to chase adjacencies to your current business models, and at the same time keep building infrastructure.

Speaker A: And in terms of the product part, you know, you started with, you know, the wedge being transferring, right? The remittances, which on the one hand is amazing when you think about, you know, how you want to build one of these companies because it's so high volume, high, you know, high frequency. It feels like you can capture a lot of people quickly. And if you compete on price and ease of use, like people are very happy to switch, right? There's like very low switching costs, but the downside feels like there's low switching costs.

So, you know, if someone else comes in. Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. Speaker A: So how do you think about like deepening? Speaker B: So this is the urgency that our team, uh, uh, The process is on, right? So we realize that what we've done is not unique. Anyone can come and outprice you, have a better experience— hopefully not better experience, but at least outprice you. And for that, you need to get deep into the consumer wallet very, very quickly. Um, so we are building 3 to 4 products that we think all of our users desperately need.

They will pay money for, uh, they will use, uh, week on week. And a large part of that is what will allow us Okay, what is our right to win on the first couple of products? And then which products will allow us to then do the most cross-sell? The secondary dimension here is that we are in a regulated space. So a lot of our roadmap is also driven by the regulator. Yeah. Speaker B: So this is the urgency that our team, uh, uh, The process is on, right? So we realize that what we've done is not unique.

Anyone can come and outprice you, have a better experience— hopefully not better experience, but at least outprice you. And for that, you need to get deep into the consumer wallet very, very quickly. Um, so we are building 3 to 4 products that we think all of our users desperately need. They will pay money for, uh, they will use, uh, week on week. And a large part of that is what will allow us Okay, what is our right to win on the first couple of products? And then which products will allow us to then do the most cross-sell?

The secondary dimension here is that we are in a regulated space. So a lot of our roadmap is also driven by the regulator. Yeah. Speaker A: You know, let's talk about that piece actually, because we've obviously seen a lot of momentum around the regulatory stuff within the US. You know, how much does that impact you given the markets that you already serve? And then, you know, then we can talk about, you know, India's regulatory environment. Speaker B: I think the genius act is great that it happened now. I was thinking about it, right?

Like, is it better off that it happened now, or should it have happened slightly earlier or slightly later? I think we are the highest benefactors of it because what it allowed is a lot of focus of talent and capital in this market. So people are like, oh, this is an interesting space. So the best talent wants to work in this space and the the best capital pools find themselves attracted to the space. And we've been able to ride some early tailwinds, get some traction that allows us to attract both of the talent and capital pools.

So I think it's right, rightly time for us. Speaker A: Interesting to push back on it. Isn't there a part of you that wishes you'd had an extra 2 years before this had happened? You got a little bigger and then suddenly this happens and, you know, you're almost too big to compete with for a lot of people. Speaker B: Maybe a year. But think about it, right? Like, we were able to raise our Series A and Series B primarily because Bridge got acquired, acquired by Stripe, and then everyone started talking about stablecoins.

So I think we had the right tailwinds. Maybe the genius act itself could have come a year out again. But I think with our business, product velocity matters way more and anyone can kill us regardless a year or two years out as well. Speaker A: How do you view stablecoins' perception in the market today? Because on the one hand, there are real volumes that are happening that are, you know, just continue to sort of reach new highs and, uh, the adoption is growing really substantially. So there's these fundamentals that are, are just true about the, the way that they're being utilized.

But on the other hand, there is almost so much excitement that I wonder, has it still gone maybe a little bit over the top? Like, are we due a, a micro correction, a macro correction on, on how people view stablecoins? Or actually is it, Is that totally the wrong way to view it? And we're just in the early innings here. Speaker B: Stablecoins will not create fundamentally new revenue pools. They will to an extent, but not to the extent that AI will. They're not going to double or triple the revenue pools that exist in finance.

What they'll do is they will enable cost reductions massively across the board. The SWIFT network is clunky, terrible, prohibits trade, prohibits value exchange and it's fees for everyone. That will get replaced, hopefully. Exchanges don't run 24/7. It's T+2 day settlements. All of that will get streamlined. So there will be a lot of efficiency over the next 10, 15 years with stablecoin adoption across the board, across industry. Like finance will feel real time and that will create a lot of great businesses. It might not create trillion-dollar industries and that's where I think some of the misplaced belief from my capital allocators might come in.

But there are still great infra and application consumer-level businesses to be built out. Speaker B: Stablecoins will not create fundamentally new revenue pools. They will to an extent, but not to the extent that AI will. They're not going to double or triple the revenue pools that exist in finance. What they'll do is they will enable cost reductions massively across the board. The SWIFT network is clunky, terrible, prohibits trade, prohibits value exchange and it's fees for everyone. That will get replaced, hopefully. Exchanges don't run 24/7. It's T+2 day settlements. All of that will get streamlined.

So there will be a lot of efficiency over the next 10, 15 years with stablecoin adoption across the board, across industry. Like finance will feel real time and that will create a lot of great businesses. It might not create trillion-dollar industries and that's where I think some of the misplaced belief from my capital allocators might come in. But there are still great infra and application consumer-level businesses to be built out. Speaker A: In terms of India's regulatory environment, we talked about, you know, this is obviously such a big remittance economy.

This is a big crypto economy. And in many ways, India has been incredibly forward-looking in terms of building, you know, maybe we call it civilian tech or tech, you know, sort of this infrastructure for the country with UPI and so on and so forth. How has the sort of government or regulators, how have they looked at crypto from the stablecoin perspective and the stuff that is relevant to you? Speaker B: So take a step back, right? Like with most developing nations, what do regulators care about? They care about consumer protection and then national interest.

I think crypto had a bad name in India, like other countries where people are getting scammed, rug pulling was happening. So they were generally conservative, but India also never had outright ban on crypto like China or other countries. They had like a regime where crypto exchanges could thrive. Recently, Coinbase invested in an Indian exchange at a $3 billion valuation. Speaker B: So take a step back, right? Like with most developing nations, what do regulators care about? They care about consumer protection and then national interest. I think crypto had a bad name in India, like other countries where people are getting scammed, rug pulling was happening.

So they were generally conservative, but India also never had outright ban on crypto like China or other countries. They had like a regime where crypto exchanges could thrive. Recently, Coinbase invested in an Indian exchange at a $3 billion valuation. Speaker A: And so in terms of the way that you need to work in the country, how much do you have to do through sort of like joint ventures or through other partners? Like, is that an important piece of doing what you actually want to do from a product perspective or? Is there enough freedom that you can sort of move?

Speaker B: So in India it's a lot harder because almost all licenses are strictly guarded by the regulator. So for example, the first product that we're launching, which is the non-resident accounts, we're working with an Indian bank. They essentially were kind of— they're like, okay, fine, you can come in, rework all our codebase, you can build the product from scratch. Yeah, it would be powered by us, but you would have a white label experience and the regulator is okay with those arrangements. What they're not okay is giving you a license on day one.

What that allows us is to build presence. The regulator gets to know you, and then 3 to 5 years out, you can try to get your own license. Speaker A: Fast forwarding, you know, let's say 3 years, what do you hope Aspora looks like? Where is it operational? What is it able to do for people? Speaker B: Absolutely. Speaker A: And maybe let's say 10 years, you know, what's the version then? Speaker A: Fast forwarding, you know, let's say 3 years, what do you hope Aspora looks like? Where is it operational?

What is it able to do for people? Speaker B: Absolutely. Speaker A: And maybe let's say 10 years, you know, what's the version then? Speaker B: So, okay, 3 years, uh, we definitely want to be live across 4 or 5 key diasporas, and we think Philippines, China, Egypt, Nigeria. Speaker A: China. Wow. Wow. Speaker B: Why not? Speaker A: That's a level of complexity that I imagine is like, you know, real hard mode, right? Speaker B: Correct. But why not? I know, I know. It's, it's not easy, but it's got one of the largest diasporas, one of the largest remittance corridors.

It's the second largest remittance corridor, right? So why not try? And so we live across diasporas and within these diasporas, be able to help these people manage money across borders. Have multiple accounts, access to investing in the home country, host country, as well as USD. A lot of these immigrant populations have aspirational dollar dreams. So investing in the US stock market, take access to, access to credit, credit cards, personal loans, insurances that cover you when you're traveling. And one key thing that we also want to build for the Indian diaspora is a way for them to connect with their family back home.

A lot of these people leave their family back home and there's a lot of guilt with leaving your parents. So if Aspera is able to take care of your family back home, there's a level of trust. Speaker A: And what does that mean, sending money to their family or— Speaker B: No, so I can manage my parents' healthcare insurance. I'm going to be able to get them a caretaker who can help them go to medical appointments. So build a healthcare infrastructure, manage their money. So having a way to control how they're spending, making sure they're not getting defrauded, all of that.

Speaker A: And what does that mean, sending money to their family or— Speaker B: No, so I can manage my parents' healthcare insurance. I'm going to be able to get them a caretaker who can help them go to medical appointments. So build a healthcare infrastructure, manage their money. So having a way to control how they're spending, making sure they're not getting defrauded, all of that. Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. So these are the sort of things that because of the market you're going after. They're sort of unique product opportunities, right?

It's not something a traditional neobank is thinking about. Speaker B: Correct. Speaker A: Okay. And so that's the 3 years, let's say. And 10 years, what is— what does that look like? Speaker B: We want to be HSBC's worst nightmare. But essentially at that point, we want to have a foothold into any consumer that is thinking of dealing in more than one currency uses us as a bank account. They can roam around the world, use us as a native bank account wherever they go. If they live in Singapore today, and move to Australia, they don't have to do nothing, right?

The Aspera users here, they're going to be Aspera users there. They can just click, simply add an Australian account and get on with their lives. And businesses can manage teams, vendors, buyers from around the world. They can manage money movement, they can manage their account in these countries. Speaker A: In preparing for this episode, I spoke with Akshay, who you mentioned, and I was like, hey, what do you think are some questions that I should ask Parth? And he sent me a few suggestions and one of them that I wanted to ask you about is you have what's called a New Bets team on the company.

Tell me about that. And what do you— why have you sort of built that unit quite early in a company's life? Speaker B: It's a little bit of the Amazon philosophy, right, where just do things because they help in your business and then you can spin them off. The reason we set up New Bets early on is because we're in this tectonic shift of stablecoins and we did not think of Aspora as a stablecoin backward business. But I definitely feel like as a company that has a decent amount of cash on our hands, it is worth allocating some of that to fundamentally stablecoin backward businesses and seeing if we can create tremendous value out of that.

Speaker B: It's a little bit of the Amazon philosophy, right, where just do things because they help in your business and then you can spin them off. The reason we set up New Bets early on is because we're in this tectonic shift of stablecoins and we did not think of Aspora as a stablecoin backward business. But I definitely feel like as a company that has a decent amount of cash on our hands, it is worth allocating some of that to fundamentally stablecoin backward businesses and seeing if we can create tremendous value out of that.

Speaker A: And so what does success from that division look like to you? Speaker B: Doubling company valuation or delivering a similar amount of shareholder value, right, from a small investment. But it's finding a unique problem statement that we think it's going to be a massive opportunity 10 years out. And then having like an ambitious super ninja team working on it for 2 to 3 years. Speaker A: And what have those, some of those new bets looked like to the extent that you— Speaker B: I would not, I would not discuss.

Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. Amazing. Well, I've learned so much and to sort of wrap us up, maybe we move to a few more philosophical questions. If you had the resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run? Speaker B: I was thinking about this while I was coming here. And one thing that I've been thinking about since we've been building it for the last 2 years is today foreign currency exchange still happens over bank counters, OTC traders, smaller exchanges. It's defragmented, it fragmented quite a bit and it's opaque, clunky.

What if there was one API or one protocol that could send money to whoever. And you don't have to worry about currencies, exchange rates, just transfer of value. You can operate in your native currency. They can operate in whatever currency they think is fair. And there's a global protocol that takes care of money movement. It happens instantly. It happens on the chain. It is dystopian. It is, it is going to require more than technology, I guess, coordination. Speaker A: What's a tradition or practice from another culture that you wish we would adopt more in our modern life?

Speaker B: This is going to be slightly contradictory, but I'm a big believer that if you want to truly leapfrog an economy, the economy constituents, which are the individuals, need to work extremely hard. I'm a big fan of what China, Singapore, and I guess South Korea were able to do with a tremendous amount of concentrated and coordinated effort from the individuals. I feel modern economies sort of Chandar, or I guess modern politics out of Chandar. But I still think like there's a population that should focus on that 996 mentality of let's make something fantastic, let's make one thing that's going to leap bound and make the next generation's life a lot easier.

I would love to see that. Speaker A: How do countries do that? How do you do that? Speaker B: I definitely do think that it's very hard for democracies to do that. It is almost always impossible, right? You need a little bit of autocratic elements, uh, in a government, in a country to be able to make that happen. We saw that with Lee Kuan Yew, we saw that with, uh, China's economy. And so the conclusion that I came to is any developing country which is still a democracy, it's very hard for them to leapfrog.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And have to be some autocratic elements, obviously benevolent autocratic. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Uh, that can make it happen. Speaker A: But like a Lee Kuan Yew who, who you know, was a sort of a benevolent autocrat in many ways. Yeah. For a leapfrogging mentality, that, that makes sense. I suppose we are now entering a period where a lot of those democracies that have been at the vanguard have faded enough over the last 30, 40 years, we might say, that maybe there will be a point in the future where there's a degree of leapfrogging required.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And have to be some autocratic elements, obviously benevolent autocratic. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Uh, that can make it happen. Speaker A: But like a Lee Kuan Yew who, who you know, was a sort of a benevolent autocrat in many ways. Yeah. For a leapfrogging mentality, that, that makes sense. I suppose we are now entering a period where a lot of those democracies that have been at the vanguard have faded enough over the last 30, 40 years, we might say, that maybe there will be a point in the future where there's a degree of leapfrogging required.

Speaker B: I guess so. I mean, we, we do these conversations that Europe is in decline or what's going to happen in the next 10, 15 years. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 15 to 20 years, one of these countries in Europe actually takes that stance and does go for that leapfrog mentality. And people are like, okay, now we need to really work hard to push ourselves. Otherwise we will be left behind in a way. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. In terms of global competitiveness, there is, yeah, for Europe, for example, I think it's hard to argue against Europe becoming more competitive over the past 30 years.

And so there needs to be some sort of reversal there. Final question. If you could recommend, or rather assign a book to everyone on Earth in your benevolent autocracy to everyone to read and understand, what would you want to assign to people? Speaker B: If you're talking about in this framework, right, which is if people need to be highly motivated, I think you need to point out what sheer will can do as an individual. And there's a lot of examples, but I guess the most culturally relevant one and the people that people can see is, I guess, Elon Musk.

The Walter Isaacson Elon Musk autobiography, not because of the great literature, but in this context, just showing people what one human's tenacity and perseverance can make happen is like bizarre, right? Just tells you that just work hard and things will happen. Speaker B: If you're talking about in this framework, right, which is if people need to be highly motivated, I think you need to point out what sheer will can do as an individual. And there's a lot of examples, but I guess the most culturally relevant one and the people that people can see is, I guess, Elon Musk.

The Walter Isaacson Elon Musk autobiography, not because of the great literature, but in this context, just showing people what one human's tenacity and perseverance can make happen is like bizarre, right? Just tells you that just work hard and things will happen. Speaker A: Yes. If you, if you are willing to devote your, like, every, you know, drop of blood and give up potentially all of your relationships and experience like insane amounts of pain, it is like Yeah, I mean, it is remarkable what one person can achieve, right? Speaker B: I don't think that life is for everyone, but just knowing that you can achieve whatever you want to by dedicating yourself to it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Is enough power for you. Speaker A: I agree. Speaker B: Not cry over. Speaker A: Yeah. That people don't— people almost don't realize that it is possible. And I think there's, you know, a version of history that plenty of people subscribe to and that I've really— the more I've watched exciting companies get built and you know, studied history, you've come to really feel doesn't make sense to me, which is this, you know, more bottoms-up view of history where things are gonna happen 'cause they were going to happen already and the society was ready for it when it really feels like extraordinary people who sacrifice an insane amount and usually have some sort of aspect to them that is hard for us to really feel full sympathy for, right?

Like Elon Musk is a great example where I appreciate so much of what he's done and I have great admiration for him in, in other ways, but there's also part of me that You know, I see what he is in many other places and think, God, you know, but I think that's just natural. Speaker B: That it is. Speaker A: Yeah. These people are, it's impossible to wrap your heads around them, but like they are the engines of progress in so many places. And, and that is how stuff changes. Speaker B: Do you know Dee Hock, by the way?

The Visa founder? Speaker A: No. Speaker B: So actually that is another— Speaker A: wait, what company? Speaker B: Visa. Speaker A: Visa. Uh, no, no, I've never studied that. Speaker B: That's actually a fantastic story. I think it's even more impressive than what Elon Musk has done, but Elon Musk went just like Sheer will, uh, scream at everyone that comes in front of you, just outwork everyone. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: DeHawk, to the problem we were discussing earlier, if you wanted to create this ecosystem of everyone collaborating to create a common payment engine in the world, DeHawk did achieve that with Visa.

Um, so early on, every bank had their own card system. He was able to convince everyone to unify it, gave up their own revenue, and this was across hundreds of banks across the world. And it was one of the biggest coordination problems. Yeah. Speaker A: How did he do that? Speaker B: Well, I guess perseverance, but then being able to— there's a lot of interesting stories of him using tactics to sway people, impress people, convince them one-on-one, convince them in large settings. Just a preacher. And he said, we're going to make a nonprofit organization and it's going to be this fantastic place which will allow the world to live.

He showed the grand vision of what the world could look like 50 years out. And people fell one by one. Speaker A: Wow. So he said it was going to be a nonprofit. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, Visa was structured as a nonprofit when it initially began. Speaker A: Wow. So he said it was going to be a nonprofit. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, Visa was structured as a nonprofit when it initially began. Speaker A: Wow. What a— wow. There's so many echoes of today. I can't help but think of OpenAI for that, of like this grand vision, the nonprofit, and then you figure out a way to turn this into— Speaker B: correct— Speaker A: a massive for-profit company.

Fascinating, man. I've got to research him clearly because that's a kind of story I don't know if I've ever properly understood before. Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that, that could be very interesting for your newsletter as well. It's actually very fascinating, man. Speaker A: Well, uh, that's a great place to end because you're, you're sending me down a new rabbit hole. So, uh, thank you so much, Parth. It was so lovely to chat. Speaker B: Thank you for having me, Mario. Speaker A: Amazing. Speaker B: Take care. That's it. Speaker C: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast.

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