Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 13 The Future of Financial Services
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 13: The Future of Financial Services

The Future of Financial Services

Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. We discuss Zach's philosophy on building products, how the financial system works today, and the trends Zach is seeing from the next wave of FinTech companies launching on Plaid.

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[00:02:00] – The importance of curiosity and hard challenges

[00:04:26] – Defining default consumptive state

[00:08:59] – Plaid's product origins and roadmap

[00:11:12] – Building trust as a young company

[00:14:08] – Getting early customers

[00:21:34] – Key players in the fintech ecosystem

[00:24:38] – Gauging the market size and business models

[00:28:06] – Prioritizing existing and new products

[00:30:00] – New financial applications and products

[00:32:39] – Selling to developers

[00:35:11] – Learning how to build a business

[00:37:50] – Hiring for spikes in skills and abilities

[00:39:57] – The future of fintech

[00:44:34] – What entrepreneurs need to focus on

[00:47:06] – Plaid's greatest successes

[00:49:41] – Kindest thing anyone's done for him

[00:52:50] – Finding the greatest challenge

The Future of Financial Services

Introduction

Patrick
My guess this week is Zach Perret, the founder and CEO of Plaid. Plaid helps companies build FinTech solutions by creating APIs that allow people to connect their financial data to apps and services. In this conversation, we dive into Zach's philosophy on building products, how the financial system works today, how the financial systems needs to be updated, and the trends Zach is seeing from the next wave of FinTech companies launching on Plaid. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Zach Perret.

Fostering Curiosity

Patrick
Zach, you said something that piqued my interest, which is this notion you got from your parents of great challenges. Can you describe what that idea is and why it's relevant for your life

Zach
My parents are really wonderful and both musicians, so they raised me in a little bit of a strange way. It was very much a kind of treat the child as a mini adult. They gave me adult books quite early. One of the things that my dad always framed was this concept of great challenges. What are the great challenges out there that you're going to go tackle or go work on? As a kid, that makes you a really mission driven kid and also really weird, by the way, because you talk about all of these things that none of your friends care about. But a few of the ones that really intrigued me as a kid were interplanetary exploration, for example. For this irrational amount of time, I wanted to be an astronaut, which was definitely fun, but to the point that I was 22, 23, still thinking about, how can I become an astronaut? Aging was one that really captured my attention, particularly in college, did a lot of work in the natural sciences, focusing, thinking about that, learning economic empowerment and financial freedom. That's the foundation to Plaid.

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