Latest / Leaders In Payments / Eyal Lifshitz, CEO of Bluevine | Episode 423

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Eyal Lifshitz, CEO of Bluevine | Episode 423 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's episode we have a very special guest, al Lifshitz, the CEO of Bluevine.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: So, al, welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Well, why don't we start off by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you were born, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd be happy to go way back then.
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: It's been several decades.
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: Born in New York, my parents are Israeli-Americans, so we bounced back and forth from the US to Israel, ended up spending my childhood mostly in the US elementary school, middle school and then back to Israel where I spent the rest of my teenage years, started my career there, went to undergrad there and then, yeah, found myself back in the US, had a couple back and forths, again, again, and today I live in Tel Aviv, married two kids.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Okay, awesome, awesome.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks for sharing that.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about BlueVine.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: So tell our audience what BlueVine does.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: BlueVine makes financial services more accessible, affordable and easy to use for small businesses by making it more intuitive and digital.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: We offer really an end-to-end banking platform for small businesses and more and more we're really kind of like redefining what banking is for them and delivering more and more of a financial operating system, one that is able to house more of their financial services, workflows and needs to allow them to run all their financial operations in one place.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: So specifically, when you're talking about banking, you're talking about a checking account, lending credit cards, those types of tools, right?
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: So, yes, the heart of our offering is our checking accounts.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: We have a checking account that we've been offering for a while now.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: We offer also credit products, so we have a line of credit.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: We also offer additional credit products through third parties.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: We have an integrated accounts payable offering.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: That's part of our banking, part of our checking accounts.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: We most recently launched accounts receivables management, which includes payment links and invoicing and more things to come.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: Really, our vision is to allow, as mentioned before, small businesses to house everything they need to manage from a financial standpoint to manage for their business all in one place and so one.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: There is a lot more that we're looking to offer and we're constantly listening to our customers around what they would benefit from being integrated and kind of part of our broader platform.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, and what types of small businesses?
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Just any small business.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Are there certain verticals sizes?
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Maybe talk about the customer a little bit.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: That's a great question because small businesses is or sometimes people call it SMB is such a wide category.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: The traditional definition is less than 500 employees, but the reality that one two people company has very little to do with a hundred people operations, you know they run very, very different.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: So we focus on what we define as non-commercially banked small businesses.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: There's a size when you get to as a small business or any business where, with respect to your banking relationship, you would be treated as a commercial customer.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: You know that kind of like where that line is is different depending on the bank, but by and large, if you are generating less than $5 million in revenue, you are not commercially banked.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: You are banked through the retail arms of the banks and you're served through the branches, and so that is really the segment that we focus on Less than $5 million, all the way down to zero, because we have many of our customers that join us when they're just new and starting out and have zero revenue and generally have less than, call it, 15 or 20 employees, all the way down to one, because you know they just started and they're the only employees or they may be working with contractors.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: In terms of industries, we are generally we are we're very broad.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Our offering is really kind of meant to serve a wide array of industries.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: We're not a specialist and you know maybe important to say, because there's a lot of buzz and companies serving venture-backed and technology companies that while we do have some of these companies that we serve today, that is not our core focus.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: We focus on your traditional small business.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: It could be a services company, it could be retail, it could be construction, it can be transportation.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: You know really any traditional small businesses healthcare, across the board the common denominator they're small, they're small and many times the person dealing with the finances is the owner or owners.
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: They don't have a CFO, they don't have a VP finance.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: The person coming into the bank account, making sure that there's enough money there, making sure that they can run payroll and they have access to working capital, financing it's the owner.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: And so that is really kind of our customer, the business owner, and looking to deliver more and more value to them.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I can relate to the one person business because that's pretty much what I am.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I do everything right, write the checks and do all the banking, so I would be a typical customer, I think, in a lot of ways.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about how you get new customers sort of your go-to-market strategy.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: We generate awareness to BlueVine in a number of ways.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: One is we advertise, leverage multiple channels through digital advertising, some non-digital advertising.
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: Your regular I'd say, your regular channels, whether it's Google or Meta or other forms of marketing, to make sure that we are marketing and making our small business customers that are out there aware of all the things, all the great things that we're offering.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: That is one way we're increasingly finding success with partnering with other companies that serve small businesses.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: We have a partnership with Xero, we have a partnership with Zed Business, we recently launched a partnership with Wave, and there's more and more of these companies that are like-minded in helping the same target customer that we're helping, and so we're finding ways to collaborate and having our products in front of their customers and vice versa.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: So that's another way that we generate awareness to Bluevine and, funny enough, like the fastest growing part for us is actually organic, meaning that customers are finding us not through forms of advertising or through other forms of distribution, but rather they're hearing about us from their friends, from going on Reddit, from just word of mouth, and so that is increasingly happening more and more.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: Interestingly, we are hurting customers that are finding us through a lot of the Gen, AI, chatbots, chatgpt, plexity and others, and they're just basically searching.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: I'm a small business owner.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: I need to open a checking account.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: What's the best options out there and they find us and so we're finding that more and more are finding us through this medium.
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: That used to be a smaller part Overall.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: Organic used to be a smaller part of the mix.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: Today it's getting to around 40% of customers that find or get to us completely organic.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you mentioned payments and offering invoicing and payment links, so I think that's a relatively recent capability.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: So maybe talk about that a little bit if you don't mind.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: The way we view our broader platform is allowing a small business to manage their entire financial operations, and part of that is making payments and accepting payments.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: We see those things as part and parcel of your banking.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: It's not something that should be external to your bank account, although the reality is, and that's where traditional banking falls short.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: Generally, small businesses don't find that as part of their bank account, they need to go to a third-party provider.
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: Many times they go to a fintech specifically for invoicing, for card acceptance.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: All of that we believe that should be part of your overall banking Saves you both time and money and certainty and everything is all in one place and makes your life easier, and we've been hearing from our customer that that is a functionality that they would really benefit from, so that is something that we launched more recently, a couple of months ago, we started with payment links.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: We've partnered with Stripe.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Then, shortly thereafter, we launched invoicing, all to make it easier for our customers to accept payments.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: Now we launched kind of an MVP version of that offering and we're increasingly adding more and more features and functionality to make that kind of capability more robust, because once we launched it, we already immediately had an uptick of customers using it.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: But the next thing that followed was well, this is great, but now I need one, two, three and four that you don't yet have.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: So it's a great experience to be in a situation when you're launching something and there's great reception to it, but equally, we're excited by the fact that customers are telling us this is amazing, but I need you, or I want you to do all these extra things for me, and so that is definitely top of mind and the things that we're investing in right now.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, and how would you say you differentiate yourself from your competitors out there?
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: So when you define competitors, it really kind of, in our view, you need to start broad, because we didn't invent banking as a category.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: Clearly, banks have been around and in the US there are 4,000 banks and they serve small businesses.
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: Our customers are not underbanked.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: They are certainly underserved, but there is a large number of banks out there that cater to small businesses as part of the broader audiences that they cater to.
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: Not necessarily particularly well, but they do serve small businesses, and that includes the large traditional banks.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: You know who they are.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: It includes the regional banks, but it also includes the smaller credit unions and smaller community banks.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: Their shortcomings are that they are not as technology advanced.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: Their offering from a digital perspective is quite lacking.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: In most cases, you can't open an account online.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: You can't do everything that you need online.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: You don't have the range of payment instruments that you need online, or the limits or the funds availability.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, most small businesses still need to go to the branch at least once a week to do anything that they need within their account and then anything that is requiring more sophistication, whether it's requiring software build or more sophisticated risk management.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: Small businesses are finding that outside of their bank account.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: Just think about where they're finding the solutions for card acceptance and credit card processing or bill pay or invoicing or expense management and spend management, and so they're going to fintechs for all these solutions.
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: Our approach, as described, is vastly different.
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: We believe that we should offer a very integrated banking platform to include all the things you need to run your financials, not just the basic jobs to be done holding money, moving money and credit to super prime, which is what the banks do, and so that is our distinct competitive advantage.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: In addition, we also the value that we offer to small businesses that includes no monthly fees we don't charge for a lot of the typical stuff that banks typically do, and then we offer yield on deposits really sets us apart in terms of the economic value that we offer to small businesses.
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: So that is really what sets us apart from the traditional banking industry.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: That is, for the most part, that is really the competition.
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: Now there are other fintechs that do what we do.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: We are the largest banking platform for small businesses in America, so we are certainly the leader in our category.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: What sets us apart versus other FinTech competitors is the breadth and depth of our platform the breadth in terms of the wide range of features and products that we offer and the platform, our capabilities, the infrastructural capabilities around risk management, the operational capabilities that we have that allows us to serve at scale, I'd say those are quite unique to us and we're more advanced than I would say, than our direct competitors that are fintechs.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay, great.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: So when you step back and look at the industry as a whole and I typically kind of ask this question through a payments lens, but how about maybe just from a broader financial services for small business lens, Kind of where do you see the industry headed?
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, you've mentioned that they are really interested in more kind of payments capabilities, but I'm sure they're telling you more things so kind of where is that market heading?
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: I think that you will see more and more adoption of branchless digital first native solutions and more adoption of branchless digital first native solutions.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: You know, when we think about our presence in the market, we're doing very well and certainly we're the leader among the banking platforms the fintech banking platforms for our category, but we're still a drop in the ocean compared to the overall market Meaning.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: When you look at like what is our market share overall small business banking, which is $125 billion market, we're still relatively very small.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: A couple of basis points we're growing very fast but we're still small.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: The large majority of small businesses still bank with a traditional bank.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: And part of that is they're used to the branch experience.
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: More and more of them and this is part of the generational shift that's happening are becoming more and more used to and willing to partner with a fintech and, you know, basically break free from branches, not needing to go to the branch.
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: You know today's 20-year-old business owner 30-year-old business owner as opposed to their parent, who is now kind of like they might be inheriting the business and you know their parent, who used to go to the branch all the time to conduct their business.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: The 20, 30-year-old is a consumer.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: They don't go to the branch anymore they do all their banking online and so I think that will carry over and you'll see, you know more and more openness to adopting digital first-only platforms such as ourselves.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: That, I think, is sort of like the constant, the broader kind of generational theme or technology adoption theme.
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: I think within, specifically around payments, there's certainly an expectation of on-demand real-time payments happening, Interestingly with small businesses.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: I think there's some departure with consumers, Consumers, you see, all consumers.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: Everything's on Venmo or Zelle.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: Small businesses, you know, still 50% of payments are checks.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: People forget about that, but still, you know small businesses, like the larger businesses too, are still cutting checks.
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: I think there is a trend for that requirement for real-time payments.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: We are expecting FedNow to be rolled out more broadly.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Even ACH, to be frank, is quite adequate.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: The fact that it takes two to three days for an electronic payment to basically get settled it doesn't meet today's expectation, Definitely not from consumers.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: But also businesses are looking for more real-time and I think that will generally happen with the introduction of some of these new payment rails.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: I do think some peer-to-peer payments, such as Zelle, are becoming more prominent on the business side as well, Like you're seeing that kind of like spill over, and then international payments.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: I think that's probably kind of the last, maybe frontier.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: I think that will happen as well, where payments are expecting the time for settlement, the time for your recipient to get their money, is expected to be shortened.
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: People are expecting the money to be really kind of like transferred in real time.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: I think this will be across the board and all the instruments that I mentioned.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: Okay, Well, it's hard to talk about the future and not talk about AI.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: So how have you seen AI impacted your business?
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Where do you think that's headed?
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: It is definitely hard not to talk about AI these days.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: Ai is everywhere.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: As an organization, we're certainly adopting AI in several places, from our development processes and how we code and we build products.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: Our teams are leveraging Copilot and other AI tools.
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: We are finding ways to adopt AI with some of our back office processes and some of our administrative processes.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: Right now, all these things are internal facing.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: They're not customer facing yet.
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: But we are also thinking about where to introduce AI functionality for our customers, and I can certainly see a world where we offer more and more capabilities to our customers through AI.
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: The natural one is clearly within our chat functionality.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Today we do have chatbot, but it is mostly template based.
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: It's not AI driven.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: That is something that we'll likely introduce at some point more agentic AI capabilities to create more of a conversational experience with a customer that's using our chatbot and provide more robust answers and more self-serve options, and so that is certainly something that we're thinking about.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: But then there's certainly like the next kind of iteration or kind of set of features that we think would make sense.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: You know, part of this is to create more of an not just somebody to help you or like a chatbot to help you with questions, but really more of an advisor, giving you advice on what you should be doing, how to manage your money more effectively, how to manage your money more effectively, how to maximize your earnings on yield, thinking about your capital and what it makes sense to potentially access capital.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: So somebody there to be able to provide you not just insights and execution of orders but also advice.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: That I think would be really kind of like the next frontier.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: And then we're also thinking about features within our offering that could be better provided through AI.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: Are there things that we can generate with AI that would benefit our customers?
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: We are thinking about some functionality there.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: So no shortage of ideas.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: Our team comes up with ideas all the time around.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: Oh, we can do that.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: We can do this, whether it's to create more efficiency internally or also to create more value to our customers.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: And we are constantly considering our roadmap and how to embed AI within our roadmap.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: Okay, okay, great.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Maybe walk us through your career background, how you came up with the idea, started the company.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Maybe walk us through that journey, if you don't mind.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, happy to.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: So, you know, maybe, starting from maybe the not so obvious I was not in banking before, you know, and I think maybe sometimes, like people not working in a certain industries, are able to look from the outside in and potentially innovate where you know.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: There wasn't as much innovation before, but wasn't in finance, wasn't in banking like that.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Starting there, I started my career as an engineer.
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: I studied undergrad electrical engineering.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: I started working in semiconductors.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: I worked at Texas Instruments and algorithms and so very far away from where I am today.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: But as somebody who has started his career in technology and engineering, engineers like to build and I still like to build today.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: That's definitely part of my DNA and part of what potentially grabbed me to or drew me into starting a company.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: It's more of kind of the desire to build.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: So I did that.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: But then over time recognized that while I like technology and I like building, I am more interested in the business side.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: At that time I was living in Israel.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: I moved back to the US, I went to business school, felt like I wanted to expand my understanding and my experience on more of the business side of things.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: I worked in consulting for a bit in my experience on more of the business side of things.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: I worked in consulting for a bit and then afterwards I worked in venture capital.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: I worked at Greylock Israel.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: That was a venture capital firm based in Israel that was investing in companies in Israel and Europe.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: I moved back to Tel Aviv for that purpose.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: Greylock Israel was part of overall Greylock Partners, which is a very well-known venture firm.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: This was their at the time separate pool of capital for Israeli and European startups, and so I worked there for several years.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: That's the time that I really kind of like fell in love with fintech or financial technology.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: Greylock was a big investor in fintech companies.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: We had the opportunity and success investing in many phenomenal fintech companies.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: As an example, they invested and I was part of that process in Marketta's seed round at the time.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: So I had the privilege of getting exposure to companies of that type and at the same time, I was also always fascinated by small businesses.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: My dad was a small business owner.
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: He had a physical therapy clinic in New York for over two decades five employees right within our target segment today.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: By the way, around 10% of our customers today are from healthcare and many of them are physical therapists, like my dad so, growing up, had a lot of visibility to the pain points of small businesses knew that financial services is an area that is not easy for them and there's a lot of opportunity from capital to banking, so that is something that was always top of mind for me.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: So the combination working in venture and learning about fintech and all the opportunities building fintech companies plus the fact that I was passionate about small businesses really that combination led me to start thinking about where might we have opportunities within fintech to help small businesses, and that's how Bluevine was born.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: That was 12 years ago.
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: We started the company in 2023.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: Started with basically a PowerPoint and an idea, and that's history.
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: It's been 12 years since.
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: A lot has happened.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: Over those 12 years We've expanded and have grown the business to almost 500 employees now.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: We have served over 750,000 small businesses.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: We managed a billion and a half dollars in deposits.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: We've lent over $16 billion.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: We've provided over $16 billion of financing to small businesses.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: So we've done a lot over these 12 years and I'm very proud of the team.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, awesome.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: So what is something you're passionate about?
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: With work I mentioned.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: You know I started my career as an engineer.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: I like to build.
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: If I wasn't the CEO, no-transcript.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: Not just the effort of the product team.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: There's the broad range of the company tech, product, legal, operations, team, risk management, marketing.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: Everybody plays a part in that.
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: I personally, again, I love the building part and I love the product part.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: So that's something that I'm certainly passionate about at work, outside of my broader passion about small businesses and speaking with customers.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: That's why we started the company.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: Personally, I mentioned I'm married.
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: I have two kids, a 13-year-old and 16-year-old, and years go by fast.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: So whenever I have an opportunity to spend time with them, whether they like it or not it's a advantage.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: We have a vacation planned in August.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: We have nowhere else to go, so we're going to be with them and for me that is definitely, when we have any available time, try to spend it with the family, okay great.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: So one final question If someone comes to you, maybe they're right out of college or maybe they're switching industries or careers and they're interested in financial technology, fintech, payments- what kind of advice would you give them to help them be successful?
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: The number one advice I would tell them is join a startup.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: If I were in their shoes, I wouldn't join a mature corporation.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: And the reason is when you're joining a startup and potentially even a younger startup, the visibility that you gain into the broader set of considerations getting more depth of understanding around the different functionality within payments, the market, the products and features set I think you just have a broader view.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: You just have, like, more ability to do more when you're in a startup versus when you're a larger corporation that has more employees and then it tends to be more specialized and siloed and so you don't always get full visibility of everything versus when you're in a startup.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: You will learn the full value chain.
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: You will learn everything.
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: The extent of the learning there, I think, is probably greater than going for a larger one.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: Sometimes it's scary joining a startup, but I think certainly folks earlier in their career the learning is there.
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: You're just drinking from a fire hose and I think at that time in your career that's what you should be optimizing for Not pay, not necessarily the brand name of a larger company, but the learnings in there.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: It's hard to compete with the learning in a startup.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: It might feel bumpy and rocky and the learnings may not necessarily be structured.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: It's not like structured training but I think you will come out of it with a lot of benefit, that would be my advice of benefit, that would be my advice.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I love that advice and I totally agree with you.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: So before we wrap up, I just want to kind of open the floor, see if there's anything else you wanted to cover any final comments.
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: Before we wrap up the show, I go back to small businesses.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: You know, small businesses are the heroes of our economy, 50% of the GDP, the largest employer, unfortunately underserved by the traditional financial system.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: And so, bluevine, we are really kind of innovating, redefining what banking is and delivering a whole lot of value to small businesses.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: We have built a lot over these 12 years.
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: We've done a lot, very proud of what we've done, we're only in the beginning of the journey, maybe kind of top of the third.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: So there's a whole lot ahead of us and I'm really excited for the next parts of the journey.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: So lot ahead of us and I'm really excited for the next parts of the journey Okay, great.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: So thank you so much for your time.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: Thanks for the wrap up there.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that and, again, I know your time is very valuable, so I want to thank you for being here and again.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: Hopefully in a year or two we can connect again and hear more of the story about payments.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: So again, thank you so much for your time today.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: And to all your listeners out there.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 24:02
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