YouSaid · the spoken record

Ram Palaniappan

lines on the record: 13
first: 2017-12-19
most recent: 2017-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, first of all, I wouldn't say that peril's been rigid since the beginning of time. I think the concept of this rigid paycheck is only a few centuries old. I mean, till a few centuries ago, people were actually paid every day. As a society, we did not accept that people could go home without their pay. There's references to this in the Bible where you're required to pay employees before sunset. Clearly employees would rather get paid before they worked and companies would rather pay the employees after they worked. And the fact that all companies today pay employees after they work just shows you where the balance of power is that is so skewed towards the companies away from the individual, but it wasn't always like that. There's different categories of incumbents. And each one of them have got institutionalized and have got things that keep them in place. Like you could look at banks, and banks have so many advantages. They have access to payment networks. As a startup, you can't get into payment networks. They have access to capital. As a startup, we really can't take deposits, so they got really low cost capital. They've got privileged access to regulation where they can get a chart and they can do all these things, or we have to go get licensed for these things one by one. So there's like a huge hurdle for us.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we're getting there. I think that the problem's not going to solve itself. And I also think charity alone is not going to be the solution to solving the financial needs of low-income Americans. I think charity certainly has a role to play that role. But I think for-profit companies can play a really unique role in this space of helping low-income Americans just understand different opportunities for how they can improve their own financial health. I also think it requires us to be a little bit more creative. It requires us to think of different models of business and how to generate revenue such that it doesn't pollute the goals of what we're trying to build.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from the way we get customer acquisition, word of mouth is very big. There's also a really strong community aspect to the product because we let users pay whatever they think is fair. Very often users will cover the cost for another user. And so if I go in and I offer a tip more on the app, it'll show me that I'm covering the transaction cost for another user. And as soon as the other user comes in, it's going to say, RAM already paid for you. Ram already covered the cost of your transaction. And then that person can send me back a thank you message. And so every day there's thousands of thank you messages going up and down between our users. On the acquisition side too, we actually put it back in the community. So if you got one of your friends to use the product, we're going to say Angela got one of our friends to use the product. And people from the community can actually thank Angela with money. And so even our acquisition is funded by the community.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so our product, when people hear about it the first time, it's you can get your pay whenever you want, and we don't charge any fees or interest, so we let the users just pay whatever they would like to pay. So it's get your pay whenever you want and pay whatever you'd like for the service. They're super skeptical of it. This sounds too good to be true, should be a scam. But reality is what they're used to, overdraft fees and payday loans, like those are too bad to be part of our future. And so we're not going to compromise the product because it's much better than what people expected. I think as they see others using it, there's much more acceptance of it. And then they completely hit the other products that we're always taking advantage of them.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solve a real pain point for We started with a very niche pain point of it's hard to check my balance on my EBT card. I've got to call this phone hotline. It takes a couple minutes and it's like, it's not the worst thing, but it's kind of annoying. If we can take that to a three-second thing that you can check on your smartphone the same way that you would check your card balance for your chase debit card, we think that that kind of is enough to get somebody to engage in the product. And then our opportunity is to use that entryway to create real value for people who are lower income.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lens on that problem is a little bit, it's kind of odd because the incumbent in this case is actually a partner of ours in the sense that it is a government program. We're providing a skin on top of. So we're not trying to displace the incumbent necessarily. We're trying to augment the service that the incumbent offers because we think there's a lot more to gain from the consumer's point of view. We bring a lens of consumer software that's kind of intuitive in Silicon Valley, but far from intuitive when you talk to state governments and we talk to federal governments and the folks who run programs like the food stamp program. And so what we try to do is kind of blend both. We try to blend the best of the food stamp program with kind of the philosophies around how you can make something that people really want and that solves a real consumer need and then bring that to the market at scale. We try all different types of acquisition strategies, but the most important of them is word of mouth. So we have a million monthly active users across the country now who use Fresh EBT at least once a month. These are all families that are on food stamps. About 60% of them found the app through some friend or family member telling them that this is something that they should try. We think that's the core kind of”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, ours is very simple. We don't say no. If you worked, you get your pay. We don't do any of the decisions. We don't ask for Social Security number. Don't ask for your phone number. Don't ask for your home address. If you worked, you get paid. We make sure that they're actually working and we calculate how much they've earned. We'll also look at their bank accounts so we can calculate what is the rate at which they earn money. So if they worked radars, we know how much that is in dollar terms. And so we pull all of that data to construct how much somebody has earned. And once you've earned it, we let you take it out. And so all that you have to do as an employee is give us access to the pieces of data that we need to show that you've worked. And so as long as we can see that you've worked, then we'll let you take out money.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up in a loving and supportive household that also had trouble putting food on the table. I ended up getting a full ride scholarship to Stanford where I studied CS and cognitive science and then ultimately landed at Facebook as a product manager. In 2014 I left Facebook looking to apply the skills of Silicon Valley Tech to solve some of the social challenges that I cared really deeply about. And so moved out to Brooklyn to join a nonprofit to do a fellowship program. Through that program started to learn about the food stamp program. And so as Angela said, it's a massive program that touches about one in seven families throughout the United States, but the user experience of it coming from Facebook and thinking about things from the point of view of what we expect from these modern software companies seems just totally out of whack. We learned about the program by applying for food stamps ourselves, and so my team and I went to the food stamp office in Brooklyn to apply. And one of the things that was really striking about that is that you go to that line, you see hundreds of people standing in line to talk to a human caseworker and fill out a paper form. And the majority of people are passing the time and have a smartphone in their hands. So the problem is not a”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 80 countries. We lent over a billion dollars to low income people in rural places that way. But along the way, I got really interested in the business of microfinance and what is good about it and what is not. And I realized that a lot of the people I was working with had mobile phones and digital money and you could lend money directly to them without going through an NGO in Kenya or India or wherever. So I kind of got obsessed with this idea of lending to someone's phone and eventually left and started this new company called Branch. It was essentially doing artificial intelligence based lending to people on their phones. Right now we work in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania and we're about to launch in India.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my story goes back right after I graduated from college in the early 2000s. I was a Java developer at TVO, and I was really restless with that and had a lot of ideas. And so I ended up traveling all over Africa and getting really interested in entrepreneurship there and volunteering at various NGOs making videos of borrowers who were using a $500 loan to start a restaurant or get supplies for a pharmacy or things like this. And being an internet person, I eventually made a website for this, sort of like ROM story, started lending to these people in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, or my own website, and getting the money to Africa via wiring money back and forth with an NGO. And really got into this. And in about 2005, all of a sudden it got really popular and we were on TV and we were on Oprah and we got a lot of press. And so we eventually expanded that system called Kiva to...”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really simple web form and said if you want money, just go fill out that form. And then once I had that web page out, there were people who I didn't know would try to use it. So I said, okay, this is more interesting. Let me see if I can do it for people who I don't know. So I had them give me access to their employer's time renders system, and I could do the same thing for them. And I realized what I was doing was essentially what the payroll system does, is it looks at how much you've worked, calculates what your take-home pays, and then pushes that into your back account. But instead of doing that in a batch for everybody, I was doing it for each employee when they wanted it. And when I did this, they were paying all their bills on time, no more overdraft fees, no more payday loans, like their life was much, much simpler, just giving them access to the pay that they had already earned. And so that's kind of how this started. Today we do it in a far more automated way for employees for over 25,000 companies.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew how to move money, but I also needed to know if they were working or not because I wasn't part of the company. So I just had her give me the username and her username and password to the time Natana system. And then if she wanted money, she would message me. I would log in as her and see if she had earned as much as she wanted. And if she had that money, then I would push it out to her and then pull it back on the next payday. And so this went on for a little bit, and every time she wanted money, she'd message me. But if I went out to see someone, I come back this dirty long list of messages. And I'd like, have read through her entire day's story to figure out how much she wanted. And so I was like, this is not going to work.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was running another company also in the payment space in Cincinnati, and I noticed that some of my employees, particularly the ones in the call center, were getting lots of overdraft fees and short-term loans. It didn't make any sense to me because I was paying everybody well, and I didn't think that they had to go to those clearly bad financial products. And so when I spoke with one of my employees, she said the issue wasn't how much we were paying her, the issue which she needed money then. And we would pay her only the next Friday, which is how our payroll system ran. And so I ordered a check from my account, which is, I think, with millions of small business owners do. And then on payday, she paid me back. And I did that because I hoarded money for the work that she had already done. If she could, I would have had to actually pay her that day, but because she wasn't quitting, she'd have to wait till the next Friday to get paid. And so this went on for several years. We sold most of the company and moved out from Cincinnati to the Bay Area. And I had all of my employees on Instant Messenger. And so they weren't enough I'd still do this for them. And I didn't mind doing it.”
2017-12-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source