Tyler Griffin of Financial Venture Studio on how fintech innovation helps consumers

Tyler Griffin of Financial Venture Studio - Podcast Transcript

Scott:	Hey, it’s Scott Or at Kruze Consulting, and welcome to another episode of Founders and Friends. And before we start the podcast, let’s give a quick shout out to Rippling. Rippling is the new cool payroll tool that we see a lot of startups using. Rippling is great for your traditional HR and payroll. They integrate very nicely. But guess what? They did another thing. They integrate into your IT infrastructure. They make it really easy for when you hire someone to spin up all the web services and their computer. Which sounds kind of like not a huge deal, but actually we did the study at Kruze. We spend $420 on average, just getting a new employee’s computer up and running and their web services up and running. It’s actually a really big deal. Saves a lot of money. And the dogs are eating the dog food. We see a lot of startups coming in to Kruze now using Rippling. So please check out Rippling. Great service. We love it. I think we have a podcast with Parker Conrad. You can hear it from his own words. But we’re seeing them take market share. So, shout out to Rippling. And now to another awesome podcast at Kruze Consulting’s Founder and Friends. Thanks. (singing).
Singer:	(Singing) It’s Kruze Consulting Founders and Friends with your host Scotty Orn.
Scott:	Welcome to Founders and Friends Podcast with or a Kruze Consulting. And today my very special guest is Tyler Griffin of Financial Venture Studio. Welcome, Tyler.
Tyler:	Thanks so much for having me.
Scott:	Oh, my pleasure. So, we just had a really fun conversation before we turned it on. But maybe you can just tell everyone, retrace your career a little bit, and how you had the idea for Financial Venture Studio.
Tyler:	Yeah, absolutely. So, I got in to this world in 2012. I started a company called Prism Money. It was a consumer bill payment product. And did the classic thing that all founders do, which is make a ton of mistakes. And didn’t really know anything about the financial services world, right? So, my co-founder and I knew how to build a product. We had reasonable ability in terms of thinking through design and marketing and all that. But we didn’t know what the heck we were doing when it came to financial services in the US. Ended up getting investment from a guy named Ryan Falvey who at the time was running the Financial Solutions Lab. And that was primarily a series A fund that was designed to help founders. It gave them money, but also access the financial services ecosystem, largely using JP Morgan’s network.
Scott:	Oh, interesting.
Tyler:	Super valuable to me. Learned a ton from that. We had a complicated business. We were paying bills, we had money transmission considerations. We were launching a virtual card product. It was a lot of esoteric financial product type stuff. And I learned a ton from Ryan and the network that he built. After I sold the business, I went and worked with him for about a year as an entrepreneur in residence. And we did some really cool deals together like Dave.com, Nova Credit, Token Transit, which I think you know really well.
Scott:	Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler:	And Ryan invested in a company called Digit before I had joined up with him. So some really, really seminal fintech companies of the past few years. And for all of them, he was instrumental in helping them build these networks. And it’s just kind of knowledge that you can’t get anywhere else. There’s no book about this. And If someone did write a book about it, it would be obsolete by the time it got published. And there are no blog posts. All this knowledge is locked up in people’s heads. And so in 2018 we decided let’s take that idea, that founders really need this network of people and ideas around them, but we can do it at the seed stage instead of the series A. Series A is actually, it sounds really early to bankers at JP Morgan, obviously, but reality is it’s pretty late in the startup world. Your product’s pretty big. So, we said, okay, let’s pull this back and do it at the seed stage.
Scott:	You’ve probably already you made a ton of those mistakes that you were commenting on that you did in your company by series A. You’re lucky, if you make too many of those mistakes, you don’t get to series A.
Tyler:	Yeah. If you made it to the series A, you recovered from all the mistakes you made basically. Yeah. So, we’re like, well, let’s try to get ahead of some of those mistakes. So we built FVS to really do this at the seed stage, and start getting that network around the founders while they’re still iterating on the product and iterating on the growth strategy.
Scott:	That’s amazing. And I’d forgotten when we first talked that you had actually started a company. I mean, it’s got to be kind of crazy to look at the infrastructure and all the things you had to probably build yourself back then versus all the APIs, and how the financial infrastructure’s been kind of exposed in a good way. It’s at least you kind of understand what needs to happen. And there are vendors for some of the services that you’d plug into if you’re building a fintech company nowadays.
Tyler:	Yeah. It’s awesome. It’s getting easier and easier to start businesses. I think generally that’s true, but certainly in financial service services. Obviously, the cloud computing, AWS, all that made a complete difference in how to do it. I remember when I was starting Prism talking to founders who were 10, 20 years older than I was, and they were just saying, “Wow, man. You guys don’t know how good you have it. You don’t have to rack servers. You don’t have to go raise millions of dollars to buy hardware. You can just spin up instances in the cloud.” And so that was a sea change. And then now you’ve got these infrastructure providers that exist for founders to just plug into. And I think it’s part of a general change that I think is happening in the industry, which is the increasing primacy of design and marketing over a lot of the really esoteric engineering problems. You have some companies that are just pure esoteric engineering. That’s great. Those could be super valuable businesses. But you have this whole other crop of companies where a lot of the gnarliest engineering challenges are abstracted away. And the biggest challenge that you have is design, growth, customer service, customer acquisition. And so especially on the consumer side, we’re really focused on finding founders who are excellent at those things. Recognizing that they can defer some of their technical, the deep tech pain, until later in the company’s development when they outgrow, and you can outgrow some of these service providers, right? But, typically, that doesn’t happen for a few years.
Scott:	So, it sounds like your investing targets are either a huge amazing leap, or something on the design or customer interaction level. Or are you also looking at some of the infrastructure plays and being like, oh man, I wish that existed when I was doing my company? Let’s fund this and make it available for everybody.
Tyler:	Yep. Absolutely. We like both of those types of businesses, right? The underlying infrastructure businesses, we think are great and super valuable. And the consumer side. We as a fund tend to have more consumer businesses in the portfolio, mainly because we’re one of the few specialty funds that really likes consumer. A lot of the fintech focused funds are exclusively focused on the B2B businesses, or the infrastructure businesses. And we love consumer. So, we end up having a lot of those in the portfolio. But we draw the aperture really wide when we think about fund investing. If you’re B2B, B2C, infrastructure, we are happy to play ball with all of that.
Scott:	I’ve noticed that too. And I’ve heard of your company, Dave. That’s a front-end consumer facing company, right?
Tyler:	Yep.
Scott:	Is that because like fintech 1.0 was tackling all these infrastructure problems, and no one had really… Maybe LendingClub was the only one that had kind of scaled to be semi-consumer facing. But it feels like all those seeds you planted, and some of your co-investors planted three or four years ago, are now turning into these neobanks that are humongous. It feels like you made the right bet three or four years ago.
Tyler:	Yeah. There’s a combination of things happening. I think what was happening three, four or five, eight years ago, whatnot, was just the consumer companies just had to build a lot of this infrastructure themselves. And they just didn’t want off. I mean, even at my old startup, Prism, we effectively built the same thing that Plaid built early in their life. And we effectively a parallel technology to that. Because nothing else existed, and there wasn’t anything to plug into. So you had the same types of companies, I think, in many ways being built. You just had far fewer of them because it took so much more energy, so much more resources to get these products to market that it was a slower process. And I think you could analogize that perfectly back to the 90s where consumer startups were being built, and great companies were being created. It just took millions of dollars to buy hardware, and it took a lot longer. So there was less happening. The activity was slower. But the same thing was still fundamentally happening just at a different scale.
Scott:	Yeah. It makes perfect sense. And for your fund, you guys are investing at, what? Maybe give the target stage, what kind of founders, that kind of stuff that you’re looking for.
Tyler:	Yeah. Well, so our general line is it’s never too early. We’re happy to be the first money into a business. Typically-
Scott:	That’s awesome.
Tyler:	… We will invest-
Scott:	That’s super powerful. That’s really cool.
Tyler:	Yeah. We love it. I mean, and that’s part of it. Finding these brilliant founders who have these really cool ideas, and sort of helping them bring that to fruition is really, really cool. And it’s really fun. Generally speaking, we usually end up playing ball when there’s a product that they’ve built. Even if it’s early, it might be a prototype. But there’s something that they’ve constructed. Okay, we can sort of see that this exists. But we’ve done idea stage investments. And we’re happy to consider that. For our initial investment, series A is about as late as we would go. And so, we really like that pre-seed, seed, that’s sort of our sweet spot. And then we’ll do some series A’s. Beyond that, we’re typically following onto existing investments that we have in the business.
Scott:	That’s amazing. The reason why I reacted to you being the first money in being so awesome is the investment world right now, especially, is really flush with cash. And so there’s all these people out there who are happy to invest once you have traction. But I feel like, even though there’s a lot more seed and pre-seed money, it’s still hard for founders to get that first believer and the first check to start building their dream. And I think that’s a rare breed. There’re many funds that we work with who do that, but I have the ultimate respect for funds like you that do that because you’re actually taking the most risk. You’re doing a lot of the hard work for the founders. You’re also helping the them set their DNA. That’s super value adds investing in my book. And of course, the later stage people provided a different value and more capital, and things like that. But I love the stage that you’re playing in because I think it’s probably the hardest. And so, kudos to you for playing there.
Tyler:	It’s fun. I mean, it provides you as the investor the ability to sort of really be creative with the founders. And you can think just incredibly broadly about what’s happening because you’re not analyzing revenue. Before I did my startup, I worked at a private equity fund, like a leverage buyout fund. And it’s just all math, right? You’re just plugging numbers into a model. And well, you’re taking the management numbers, you’re cutting them by 15%, and then you’re plugging them model. And you’re like, does it still work? And it can be very lucrative, but it’s not all that intellectually interesting. I mean, it’s interesting for the first year or so when you’re learning how all the financial analytics work. And it’s sort of fun to nerd out to complicated Excel models. But after you do it a few times, it becomes kind of plug and play. And it’s fun just working with a founder to consider how is this business going to work? How are you going to build it? What’s the strategy? Those are really fun conversations to have with founders. But it’s hard. I have a lot of sympathy or empathy with founders who are raising these really, really early rounds where it’s just, no one really believes in you. And it’s brutal to have those conversations. And even when we’re turning down founders, it’s just like, yeah, I was turned down. I know what it feels like. It’s just you know you can do it. You know you have the skills to do it. And you’re just sort of getting people like, “Yeah, I don’t really see it.” I had one crazy in meeting with a cohort of angels. And we had built a prototype of the product. And we sat down with this guy. And he’s like, “Yeah I don’t know. I just don’t really think you guys can build it.” And my co-founder and I look at each other. And we said, “But we just demoed it. You literally just-
Scott:	We did build it.
Tyler:	… Used the product that we built. Yeah, it’s not beautiful. It’s not production ready. But clearly we can build it.” And it was just one of those examples of where you’ve got to be a storyteller. And it is a skill. I mean, I kind of, to some extent, wish it weren’t. I wish the only things that mattered were technical ability, or design, or marketing, or all the sort of core skills. But being able to tell that story and convince investors that you’re the team to do it, it is its own skill. It’s one of the most important skills in venture.
Scott:	I always say that it’s sales. Getting a company funded is sales.
Tyler:	Everything. Yes.
Scott:	And also, I caution the entrepreneurs, the person you’re meeting with at the VC you’re meeting with that day might just be having a bad day, or may not see it. There there’s a lot of fish in the sea. I I’ll have these conversations where a founder’s crushed because the dream person they wanted to invest in their company said no. But when you really look at it, the distribution of investors, especially at the early stage, I mean, there’s so many winners and there’s so many different angels or VC firms that are the first money into these companies. Don’t quit because of that. Just keep going. You’ll find someone who’s interested and who’ll fund you.
Tyler:	I mean, I think unless you’re hearing consistent feedback. The one thing to just know as a founder, in some cases you are going to get pretextual feedback from investors because they just didn’t feel it. Maybe they just didn’t think you were amazing, or they didn’t really like the product, or they didn’t have a good feeling. And we really hard not to do pretextual turndowns, but a lot of investors do. And I’m sure I have even unwittingly before. And yeah, don’t take that feedback too to heart unless it’s consistent. If everyone is telling you that your design is awful. Or if everyone is telling you that it doesn’t appear that you have a strong technical co-founder or something. Yeah, you might want to start listening.
Scott:	Yeah, that’s a great point.
Tyler:	But don’t just take one dream investor’s feedback, and be like, oh yeah, this guy told me X would never work. It’s like that doesn’t mean anything. Just keep pitching.
Scott:	I agree. You have a great phrase when you’re talking about the kind of person you’re looking for to bring into the fintech studio. Maybe talk about that, and maybe talk about the process, like the coaching, the actual steps you do with that person to help them become a fintech expert.
Tyler:	Yeah, totally. So, I think the phrase you’re talking about is I’ll say it’s easier to turn a brilliant technologist or a startup founder into an expert on financial services than it is to turn a banker into a startup founder. And that is the effective operating principle of Venture Studio. Our entire concept here is that we’re going to take people who are great at everything except understanding the intricacies of financial services in the US. And we’re going to just teach them all of that. And we’re going to get them in front of the people who can help them learn how to understand that whole world without having to spend a bunch of time trying to flail around online and try to get connections and introductions to people who won’t return their calls. So, we take a very broad view of what a great founder is, right? Some founders are amazing, to your point, sales is kind of instrumental, right? You’ve got to be pitching investors. You got to get investors to give you their money and employees to give you their time. And since you don’t have any money to start, most of those people you’re hiring are working for a lot less than they could make pretty much anywhere else in the economy. So, you do need that skill for sure as a founder. And then you have your technical founders, your have your design focus founders, your marketing focus founders. That’s all fine. But we’re looking for people with those kinds of skills, ideally a founding team. I do think it’s hard to start a business as a solo founder. I’m not saying we never would do it. We’re happy to invest in solo founders. But man, it’s tough. There’s no way you could get me to start a business as a solo founder at this point. I would absolutely want someone else to share the suffering with. But we’re looking at those teams. And our view is you can come here and be completely ignorant of how money transmission works, or of what an FBO account is. I don’t even care if you can spell what an FBO account is. Just, we’ll teach you all that stuff. We’ll get you in touch with the people who can help you with it. But those fundamental skills of sales, of design, technical skills, those are really what we’re looking for. And those you can’t develop inside of six months. Those are sort of lifelong things that you need to learn. But getting to know the right people at MasterCard to talk to about launching a product on their network, yeah, okay. It might take you six months as a founder, it would take us 30 seconds.
Scott:	Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. And before we get back to the podcast, quick shout out to ChartHop. ChartHop is one of my favorite new SaaS tools on the market. And, basically, what ChartHop does is it puts your org chart in the cloud. And I always like to say it brings transparency to your organization. And so, everyone in your organization can see who they report to. They can the full org chart of the company, and how their group relates to other groups. It also has a lot of information on the individuals in the company. And so, you can click on the ChartHop profile and just get where people live, their experience, Slack handles, all this kind of stuff. And it’s just a really great tool. The other thing is ChartHop has of doing some cool stuff around compensation and budgeting planning. And so, you can actually start seeing what the cost structure of the company looks like during certain kind of scenarios. So, I’m loving ChartHop. Check it out, charthop.com. We use it at Kruze. Really like it. And I can’t recommend it enough. All right. Back to the podcast. Do you put them through almost like a batch or classroom experience, or how do you structure that learning?
Tyler:	Yeah, it’s a great question. We batch them up, although we invest all the time. So obviously we’re seed investors, so we’ve got to be ready to move capital at a moment’s notice. But we do try to batch the companies up based on their stage and when we’ve invested in them. So, say we’re going to take the companies to New York and have them meet with banking partners. It’s a lot easier to tell a VP or a CEO of a bank, “Hey, we’re going to bring seven companies to meet with you. Carve out five hours and talk to them,” versus, “Hey, I have this really cool startup you should meet.” The latter move there, they’re going to flake. They have other things going on in their lives. But if we can bring a sort of critical, massive companies there that tends to work really, really well. And this is just a conversation we have with founders. We’ve done a few deals where… We did one deal, it was back in, I guess it was in February. Idea stage. It was just three people that we thought were super cool. And we said, “Okay, we’re in the middle of a program right now. You guys need to build a product. Go build your product. Let us know how we can help.” And we’d get on the phone with them every week and sort of provide some guidance or help them. But we’re like, it’s not worth flying… Well, it was COVID. But it’s not worth zooming around the country meeting with people who aren’t going to matter to you guys for months. And now we’re kicking off our next batch of meetings, actually at Money20/20. And so, we’re bringing them to that set. So, we’ve been investors in this company now for seven months, eight months. And this will be the first time we’ve actually done a formal meeting with them. So, we try to be really thoughtful about the stage of business. Sometimes we’ll invest in a later company, and just bring them right into to the current meetings, if it makes sense for them.
Scott:	Yeah. It’s probably some of the how much they need to learn, can they build their product alone for a while? That kind of stuff.
Tyler:	Yeah.
Scott:	That makes total sense.
Tyler:	You know Morgan at Token Transit.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tyler:	So, we invested early seed in that business, in the Financial Solutions Lab. And I think we probably brought him to a few meetings that were a little early, because he was still so focused on product and had just a couple other people on the team. And poor Morgan, he’d be in some networking meeting, and he’s like Indian style in the corner frantically typing code because something broke. And he’s like, “I don’t have a team yet. I got to fix it.” It’s like, okay, you’re probably too early to be doing some of this stuff because you’re still just basic blocking and tackling on the product. So, we try to be really thoughtful about that in this structure.
Scott:	He’s also an example of an entrepreneur who is incredibly good at staying focused and not distracting themselves. I feel like that’s a super core skill that I’ve only learned through… Kruze is a startup too. So, we had to learn that. There was a lot of shiny objects that we would chase early on, and then we got really focused, and that’s when the business started taking off. But he has that skill beyond what most entrepreneurs have. And I think it’s probably served him pretty well.
Tyler:	Totally.
Scott:	And that’s tough. There’s a balancing act. Because there’s a tradeoff. Every time you don’t take a meeting or don’t have a conversation, you could be losing an opportunity. But at the end of the day, building what you’re doing and staying focused is probably the easiest way of being successful. You have some other really cool companies in your portfolio that I’ve actually talked to, Anvil and Copilot. When you replay those initial conversations, is there anything that jumps out at you about those? What was so interesting about Copilot? What was so interesting about anvil?
Tyler:	Yeah. So, Copilot’s an interesting one because sometimes you hear the pitch of a company. I think with Copilot, Ryan said, “Hey, I talked to this business. You should meet with him. It’s really interesting.” And sometimes you’re just like, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. You’ll kind of want to do the deal before you hear about it. And other times you be like, ah, I don’t really get it. And Copilot was definitely one where I was not initially, just on the one sentence pitch, like, oh PFM. I know PFM really well, Mint, and even my startup had a little bit of a PFM tendency to it. And that’s another thing by the way when you’re a founder. If the investor has done something somewhat close to what you’ve built, that’s great. Because they understand the industry. If you’re a fintech founder and you’re pitching someone like me, that’s probably good. If you’re too close though, it can be bad. If you’re pitching a bill payment startup to me-
Scott:	I totally agree.
Tyler:	… So brutal. Because I’m just like, “Oh, that won’t work. And that won’t work. And I failed at that. And I tried that too.”
Scott:	I totally agree.
Tyler:	You kind of trigger the founder PTSD in these very specific things. And PFM isn’t quite that for me, but it’s on the edge of it. And so, I’m like, oh, I don’t know. PFM, really? Like we need another PFM product. And then I met the team, and I just like, this is great. I mean, Andres is obviously a super compelling founder. But the idea of, okay, they almost inverted PFM, right? They said, “We’re not going to worry about giving you lunch of knobs and levers and dials and switches and pie charts and line charts and graphs, and all this stuff. We’re actually going to abstract it away as much as we possibly can. And just sort of tell you, are you okay? Are things going well or are they not?” And they made it this very kind of 50,000-foot level, easy thing to understand. And what’s interesting is if you look back, there are two companies that sort of launched an around in the time. It was in the early 2000s. Mint and Wasabi. And Mint was actually-
Scott:	I remember Wasabi too. I totally remember Wasabi. Yeah.
Tyler:	And Mint was the simpler one, believe it or not. Because today you think of Mint was a super complicated sort of analytical product. But Wasabi was even more that way. And they were more accurate. They had better data. But it was so heavy for the consumer that consumers weren’t that excited about it. So, to me, Copilot was the next evolution of that. Now, we have much more computing power. Cloud becomes relevant here, right? Because you can spin up as much as you need. And so, we’re going to do a lot of the number crunching for you. That was when I sort of had the aha moment, where I’m like, this is actually really good idea. This is fundamentally different than a lot of the sort of standard analytical PFM apps. It’s not telling you, “Hey, you spent $8.92 on beer last weekend.” It’s saying you’re spending too much money on beer over time. You should be better about it. And so that was sort of my initial view.
Scott:	That’s a really good insight though. These even further simplification of a tool, especially engineers or accountants like myself, you want to give analytics, you want to give as much information as possible. But that insight of actually distilling it more for people is really powerful.
Tyler:	And it’s harder. It takes more engineering talent. Apple being kind of the canonical example of this, right? Where it’s very, very simple from a user experience perspective. Even sometimes when you’re a more technical end user, you can get frustrated by it. You’re like give me a little bit more access, right? Because it’s so polished. But the underlying technology to do that is really, really complicated.
Scott:	Yeah. And what about Anvil? He was probably working on it before, but I really met him when COVID launched, or COVID happened. And he was-
Tyler:	Oh, got it. Okay.
Scott:	… Turning workflows and making it so much easier for banks and people like that to the process PPP. I thought he was like a right time, right place. Great, great match there.
Tyler:	Yeah. I think it was one of these things where all of the stuff that we make fun of in terms of technical innovation that never happened has kind of ultimately happened. It just took a really long time, right? So, remember in the dot com crash you were like, oh, all these idiot telecoms that buried all this dark fiber. It’s like, yeah. But now it’s lit fiber. Now it’s being used, right? So yeah, it’s kind of too bad that a bunch of companies had to go bankrupt, but we are using that. It was just sort of before its time. And I think this sort of paperless office is another one that everyone kind of sneers at. You’re like, yeah, I remember the paperless office? And then use of paper shot up in the 90s, and everyone had laser printers everywhere. But it’s actually now sorts of happening. We have e-signatures, which are becoming more and more common. And so, Anvil’s just the next evolution of that, right? It’s like, what if you just got rid of the paper flows completely? And if you look in some of these older institutions, and banks are really common sort of offenders here, it’s like they put something together in Word, they print it out, and then they scan it. And then they email it to you. And then you print it out, and then you write on it, and then you scan it back, and then someone else types it in. And it’s absurd. And in a lot of cases, you’re not even moving the paper anymore. You’re literally printing it out, and then scanning it. And so, the paper’s just going from printer to desk to trash can.
Scott:	It’s crazy.
Tyler:	And so, Anvil’s was like, hey, let’s actually make this work better. And so you are seeing, and you saw this with some of their success with automating PPP and that, you are sort of seeing, hey, there’s a little bit of a paperless office happening now. Even though you sound kind of weird to say it now.
Scott:	Well, it’s funny because, and you had a bill pay app, like Bill.com was one of the first tools for us that Vanessa used to… I mean, we were putting our clients on Bill.com eight or nine years ago. And she’d be like, “Hey, you can pay your bills on vacation. You don’t need to have the checkbook.” And people would be like, “Wow, that sounds…” It’s like this whole trend. But I feel like we’re there. I know at Kruze, like I don’t have any paper. The only paper I have is exactly what you’re talking about, which is printing something out to sign it, to then scan it, which is totally archaic. And it’s going away. But yeah, Anvil, I’m forgetting the CEO’s name, but super nice guy. But he has something there which is really exciting.
Tyler:	It’s a great… Mang-Git’s the CEO, and then I think Ben’s the CTO. But yeah, they’re a great team.
Scott:	They’re a good combo. Well, this has been phenomenal. Maybe you can tell everyone, if they’re a budding fintech entrepreneur, or you’re just a super talented designer or marketer who wants to do fintech, how they can reach out, how can they apply to the studio? What’s the process there.
Tyler:	Yeah. Awesome. So, I guess I should have mentioned this earlier. We do one thing that’s a little unusual in venture. We do actually run an open application process about once a year. And we just had this one. It closed on September 1st. So, we’re about a month after that. But we do run that every year. And so that is one easy way to get in touch with this. Because we give an opportunity to talk about the business and upload pitch decks and all that. And then we review all of them. And we’ll fill up the next class with a lot of people from that applicant pool. But also, you can just reach out to us at info@finventurestudio.com is sort of a generic email address that comes to all of us. Or connect on LinkedIn, or any other way. Head to our website and all that info’s there. Like I said, we love talking to founders, and no idea is too early for us. That said, the more you have the better. Obviously the more of a product you have built, that makes it even more interesting. The more customers you have makes it even more interesting. But recognizing that, in a lot of cases, you need money and some partnerships to even get these things off the ground.
Scott:	I love it. Tyler, it’s been awesome talking to you. We’ve had even other conversations not recorded, which were super illuminating. So, you really know your stuff. I am a fintech junkie and you know your stuff, and your portfolio speaks for itself. So definitely, folks check out FinTech Venture Studio, and thank you Tyler for all your time. Really appreciate it.
Tyler:	Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really fun talking to you. Yeah, on and offline. So, let’s do it again soon.
Scott:	Awesome. Thanks, Tyler.
Tyler:	Thank you. (singing)
Singer:	(Singing) It’s Kruze Consulting, Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn.

Tyler Griffin of Financial Venture Studio on how fintech innovation helps consumers

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