Betterment - The Founding Story

‍

Schuyler Brown  
I'm Schuyler, this is john and Eli cofounders of Betterment, and welcome to Founders@Fail. So Betterment is a pretty interesting product. Financial Services has been a huge topic of conversation, a little thing called Occupy Wall Street financial implosion, which probably is best time to join, right? Because your parents are going to be super proud that you're going off to Wall Street. But in fact, you are changing the world and trying to build a better way to save for your retirement. So walk me through 10 second pitch, what is Betterment?

Jon Stein  
Well, so my background was on Wall Street. So I was there working for these big banks saw a lot of bad practices saw a lot of terrible products for people, and thought it was really obvious that there was a need for a better way to invest. So what we've done is we've reinvented investing the way it shouldn't be the way we would want it to be. And we've designed a product entirely around the best advice that we could give anyone about how to invest, we built all of that automated it all into a single simple user interface that just works.

Schuyler Brown  
Pretty clean pitch. It worked because they raised 3.1 million was from big fancy investors like Bessemer. That's right. And the the challenge of building simultaneously for the financial services sector, but consumer facing that's not an easy thing to bridge because you've got super conservative, but everybody likes big fancy flashy toys and consumer. So how did you approach building the front end and marketing to customers and building out the back end hardcore infrastructure with really super conservative data security and all that fun stuff?

Jon Stein  
It's a great question. Because there's like, really those two sides to the business, right? You get to have a nice, simple web 2.0 interface that it's accessible. But it's got to do all these like amazing, like financial mechanics in the background. And there's a whole regulatory side of that, too. That is really impressive, right? We're a broker dealer. We're an investment advisor, we have SIPC protection. We've been vetted by FINRA and the SEC and all of these kinds.

Schuyler Brown  
I've never even heard of half of those terms and as a consumer, I shouldn't know about them, right? Because you should just take care of them. Right.

Jon Stein  
So you know that to get back to the question, how did how do we sort of manage all that we first built the user interface, because we had to have something to pitch to people, right? Even when I was talking to the UI, about, you know, Hey, what about working on this thing, I'd have something sort of expressed the idea, right? And that came down to look, there's going to be a slider, you're going to move this slider, and that'll be how you control your investment. And you'll see some simple visualizations and how they work. And all of that came before we really started building it.

The front end comes first. That's the vision. Let's design what we really want the product to be and figure out how do we fit this into a legal box?

Eli Broverman  
You're right, the front end comes first. That's the vision, at least the way that we went about things. We said, Let's design what we really want the product to be. And we'll take it from there and figure out how do we fit this into a legal box? How do we how do we apply the best practices for database management to actually build a trading system and an account management system and the sorts of things you need to create a financial account?

Schuyler Brown  
So a really gnarly technical challenge, right? How did you begin to approach recruiting a team that could actually deliver that, because neither of you individually could could handle that kind of complexity? That's right. That's right.

Jon Stein  
Neither of us had a technical background. I was lucky and that at that time, my my roommate was a developer at Google. And, you know, he, he helped us along the way, he was the one who sort of pointed us to the right technologies to get started with and he started building out the first implementation of the back end system. He was he was really our third co founder at the beginning of things. And then he went to business school in London. And while we were still kind of infancy, I was still in business school at this time, you know, we weren't full time on it yet. And so he was working remotely on it. And then we started full time, and we got an office together and we brought in Anthony to manage the product. And that's when things started to get a little bit strained working. With, with with our other co founder remotely, because we would kind of have a conversation in the office and we would come to some kind of a decision about something. And then we would call him up and we say, so here's what we're thinking we'd have to sort of sell him on and get him on board. If he didn't agree with that. Well, you know, we had to go back and we had to talk to our committee, first of all convinced ourselves that what he was saying is right, and then we had other partners and angel investors at that point that we would have to sort of, you know, get to buy into this. And that communication process became so difficult after a while that it just wasn't, it wasn't working for for any of us. And so, you know, we had to part ways with him. And that was, that was one of the darkest sort of days of the founding of Betterment.

Eli Broverman  
Much of his credit, he stepped up and said, You know, this is, this is not the right place for me to be involved right now. Because obviously, I can't, I can't be there. And if I can't be there, then it just creates too much too much difficulty. One of the things that, you know, in retrospect, we actually did really well as we, we plan for that sort of thing from the outset, you know, really discussed what might happen if one of us were to leave. And that made that made the breakup much easier, because everybody sort of understood where things were gonna stand, and the process when amicably.

Schuyler Brown  
And when you're tackling a big regulatory hurdle to begin with, that's not something that most entrepreneurs ever prepare for, right? It's, it's a really complex structure, you know, you're going to have to make significant investment before you ever see reward for anyone who's trying to approach that sort of industry, any best practices? Where did you screw up? How do you How would you improve the process?

Eli Broverman  
The first piece of advice is, whatever your timeline is, quadruple it, for sure. We had, we had no idea how long the process would take. When we first started talking about this, we thought, okay, we're gonna roll out some sort of beta, within a year, maybe sooner, and it was a lot longer than that. It took us a long time just to figure out what the How to what the maze might look like, let alone navigate it. And, you know, in our case, we're trying to design a new product, you have to understand that rules, written by regulators are written were written decades ago, in some cases 70 80 years ago, and you're now trying to apply modern technology on top of that, and there are no, there's no textbook necessarily, you have to figure it out. So you need you need somebody, either on the team or external is really going to dive in and figure out how to apply the rules to your particular product. And then once you get that you have to be prepared to really engage with regulators. They they're, they're slow moving. And they ask tons of questions,

Jon Stein  
wonderful people for the record.

Schuyler Brown  
But by their nature, they fight innovation, because innovation is disruption. disruption is chaos and create

Eli Broverman  
Right for them. They're there, you know that, but they're by definition, they're conservative institutions. And so when you bring them a new product, you know, part of it is you have to you have to pitch them on it. That was part of winning the battle was eventually figuring out that in some ways, we needed to speak to them in a lot of the same terms that we would speak to other potential business partners, tell them about betterment, really tell them what we're doing and why it's a good product, and it's going to be a win for consumers and

Jon Stein  
Meeting them face to face, for instance, was a big part of that, like, whenever we have any sort of difficulty, we'll we'll just keep pressing on them. Let's just sit down. Let's get in the room together. Because it humanizes humanizes us. And it shows them that like, you know, we're good people, we have like the right intentions. And you know, we're building a project that's actually good for people. So you should try to help us be our partners in helping us to get this out there.

Schuyler Brown  
And I mean, the reality is coming out of the financial crisis, it's a good story. I mean, it, it actually makes sense, in contrast to everything else that had happened before that. So I have to imagine they were at least a little receptive.

Jon Stein  
They were it just took a lot of work to get them there. Because there's there's the flip side to all of that is coming out of the financial crisis, there's more scrutiny than ever, right? Like we're talking about the wake of some of the biggest disasters and regulatory history. Bernie Madoff, for instance, is in a name that you hear a lot about. MF Global is a more recent one, right? Like just a little over a couple of weeks ago. So these things, these things are on the regulator's minds, they're they they want to ask more questions they want to really dig in, in certain areas. A lot of these things like these businesses don't apply at all to what we're doing. But it still means that there's a heightened level of scrutiny.

Schuyler Brown  
Do you hire a lobbyist or a lawyer to to really, actually manage the process?

Eli Broverman  
So that's me. I'm an attorney. And that was my that was my, my background professionally before I joined the job. And it's unusual really to have a lawyer as one of the co founders of a startup. But when you're dealing In a regulated industry, it made sense it made sense for us. And, you know, we needed that we needed the full time attorney really dedicated to this project. Otherwise, I don't think we would have ever really gotten across the start line.

Schuyler Brown  
And what ultimately did get across the start line when it came down to it, you in order to get regulatory approval?

Eli Broverman  
Well, you know, it was it was a long process, you know, 14 months, 14 months, and you get a full inspection. The regulators want to know all about your business plans, your financial condition, you have to put up in our case, we had to put up a decent amount of capital to back the business so that our customers and our regulars can know that we're not just going to disappear overnight. But it's also a process that can sort of have no definite timetable on it. So what really helped us in the end was we had a constraint, we had a launch date planned, because we launched from TechCrunch Disrupt in the spring of 2010. And if we hadn't had that day, we wouldn't have pushed ourselves probably on the technical side, but we also wouldn't have had the regulatory push, because it was something that we could actually point to make a call make it write a letter and actually show the people that were in charge of giving us permission, hey, we've got a launch on this date, we've got a huge opportunity in front of us and and they understood that and responded to it. So putting the deadline out there was a big key.

Schuyler Brown  
So TechCrunch, disrupt happens. You guys win Best in your startup, you get tons of press, you start the fundraising process. Always a frustrating, difficult one. And I'm curious, in retrospect, now looking back, how how would you manage that process differently? Is there anything that you could have done to improve either the efficiency or the frustrations, I think,

Jon Stein  
Looking back I would have prepared for if I knew now, if I knew then what I know now I would have prepared for it more in advance of disrupt. Now we were full time working on the product, there was very little time to kind of start thinking about fundraising. But we really kind of wanted to raise some money coming out of that. And we will head on this attention. Now. Customers, it was like time and the phone was ringing off the hook with inbound interest, all these people coming up saying, hey, look, we love what we see, we'd like to give you some money. And you know, we're like, oh, this is great. Just hang on, we've got to talk to these other 20 people. And you know, we sort of just just kept talking to folks, and we had all these first round conversations. And then around about August, you know, we realized that phone wasn't ringing anymore, and we still didn't have any money. And you know, we didn't even have a deck together, right? We hadn't really properly pitched anyone we just been having conversations. And it's it's it's sort of like dating, you know, everyone says, Oh, that was really great. And then you know, you go away, and you don't know how it went really like at. So we decided it was time at that point to get serious and probably would have been a lot easier if we'd been serious about it early on. As soon as we got serious about it.

Schuyler Brown  
What a serious mean.

Jon Stein  
It means no, no, no, what you're looking for know that you're raising money, know how much you're raising, and know how you're going to spend it once once you got it.

Eli Broverman  
I'll tell you what else. We had a discussion about whether we should engage outside counsel that really knew the venture capital space, and we had had a few discussions. We we had some peace of mind that said, No, we can at least figure this out in the early going reasonably well. And we also thought, well, we're totally going to be overmatched here, and we could use somebody to be your advocate. And we decided eventually to hire outside counsel. And somebody that really knew space well, and it was very well connected. And that really helped jumpstart the process for us, walk me through how you evaluated potential firms and specific partners or associates to work with.

I screened a handful of good handful, probably five different attorneys that had been referred to us by other people that we trusted in the space. Some of them were some of the bigger names you hear. And I also talked to a couple smaller names. Talk to a couple on the West Coast talk to mostly guys in New York. And, you know, the questions I asked were Tell me about, you know, what your deal flow is tell me how many deals you're you're doing right now. And really you want to press for specifics as they can, they can quote statistics, but you probably want to hear about specific companies that they're working with. And you want to get their get get their thoughts on what they think a company your position, should, should be looking for in a fundraising round and make sure that that makes sense to you sounds realistic, and sort of matches with what you're, you know what you're hoping to do. And ultimately, we wound up in a good place and I probably be I should probably give a applaud dead Zimmerman of Lowenstein, who did a great job for us with helping us out with the first round and one of the things that one of the things I liked about add was I felt like he really understood what it was like to be in our shoes where, boy, you know, we've never gone through This process for first time entrepreneurs never raised money before. And he knew how to sort of lead us through the process.

Schuyler Brown  
So you, you get over the hurdle with with venture funds, they're obviously interested, they're going to put down a term sheet. You get it? How do you negotiate? What were some critical issues that you approached? And how did you do it?

Jon Stein  
We definitely leaned on our counsel quite a bit there, we sort of asked him for what was what was fair and what wasn't. We were lucky in that time. And that the term she was very plain vanilla, there was nothing unusual. And it was just kind of, it really came down to valuation and how much cash we wanted. Now, when we first went out, we said, well, maybe we'll take maybe we'll raise like a million dollars, you know, it sounds like a big number. And then, sort of through the process, we started talking about, like, well, maybe we could raise like more than that and raise more like $3 million. Right? This was the time when we first started talking to the to the venture firms. And then we can't get fixed in this idea of Yeah, we really need the 3 million if we really want to do something interesting, it's going to take that like the million dollars isn't gonna get us that far. And so I remember one of the negotiating points was we were talking to, to Bessemer. And we're talking about like the returns, and they said, Oh, well, that's fine. If you want to do that, why don't we just go back to the original plan, we'll give you a million dollars, and we'll give you like, you know, that same valuation? We're like, No, no, let's stick with the higher amount. So you got to think about those kind of trade offs. And in the end, they were just the, you know, the negotiation wasn't hard, because they I think they were very fair about everything. Now for this. Yeah,

Eli Broverman  
I would also throw a word of caution that the term sheet is not the end of the road, I don't think we ever had serious doubts that we weren't going to get the deal completed and get the money in the bank. But entrepreneurs that are just starting out and raising money for the first time in their lives need to understand that it takes a while from term sheet to funding our case, probably longer than the most. Because again, we're a regulated industry, and there's certain things you have to plan for. But regardless, it takes time for the lawyers to hammer things out. And, and on that, you know, I think that we, you know, we could have moved things along a little quicker. If we hadn't gotten stuck on a few different points that, in the end don't seem that relevant. You need to you need to pay attention and make sure that you're not over negotiating

Schuyler Brown  
diligence process, how did you manage it on your end, when venture funds, all of a sudden start to really pull the hook back?

Jon Stein  
So, so it's, it's a lot of data requests, it's a lot of presentation, I find the more work you can do up front, the better. So really, really understand the model fully be ready for all those questions. ask the hard questions yourself, figure out like where they're gonna go. And then just and build all that into the model. And it's it becomes becomes routine. By the end, you know, you already you already anticipating the next question, you already know where that conversation is going to go. And you can even kind of steer it a little bit once once you get it.

Schuyler Brown  
Was there one question that threw you that actually, in retrospect, would be helpful to talk about?

Jon Stein  
What were the tough questions that we get in the vetting process? A lot of the questions around our business had to do with, with with regulatory, you know, questions, what's, what's going on? What's your structure, like? And all of all of that was, we really had, you know, all of our ducks in a row that we really knew what we were talking about. So, so it worked out well,

Eli Broverman  
right. And people want to know, when you're just starting out, they want to know what your go to market strategy is, we had some customers, a lot of our customers that come through TechCrunch, you're not going to just get it, you're not gonna have a TechCrunch every few months. So there were real questions about how are we going to acquire customers at that point, you can only project but you know, you need to do as much careful thinking about it. As you can see, you can actually present a coherent plan.

Schuyler Brown  
So checks finally clear whole processes over holy crap. Now you got to go find an office and make hires, how did you manage the actual ramp up of recruitment?

Jon Stein  
So one thing that we probably should have done more of is start that earlier. Like, as soon as we had that term sheet, we probably should have started recruiting people. Now. Granted, again, there was a lot going on at that time, we were just dealing with customers coming in and we were answering the phone all the time for you know, customer service inquiries and jumping on bugs as they came up in in a system. But the earlier you can start that the better as it as it turned out. We, you know, we got our funding in late November, right after just about a year ago, just just after, after Thanksgiving. And, you know, it wasn't until late February, early March, we started making our first hires because of course, it takes three months to hire somebody. So start that process early and kind of anticipate, okay, we're gonna Have some money. And you know, we might as well get out there now and start trying to attract people,

Schuyler Brown  
where did you actually start to recruit people out of how did you have a strategy for what you thought the ideal profile wasn't where you find

Jon Stein  
it, I was a major LinkedIn whore for a long time and learned a lot that way. Now, we didn't really recruit anyone that way. But I just I was looking at profiles or profiles and sending people emails, and getting first round conversations and calls with people and just say you have an interesting background in marketing, you have an interesting background in technology, let's let's chat. And you get a bunch of different responses. But in that process, you start to see here are the skills that people have because everyone you know, LinkedIn is amazing tool for this right, you can see exactly like, what people's backgrounds are to get to these positions. And you start to build a profile through through looking at those, and what other people have done,

Eli Broverman  
what the ideal candidate looks like, we have not had any success with headhunters, which isn't to say that maybe that wouldn't work out again in the future. But our experience, at least in the early going was the headhunters didn't bring us really quality candidates. And we sort of knew every candidate that sat down in front of us that came from add on, or we knew pretty well, right away, that wasn't the right fit. And it didn't seem the headhunters we work with did not seem to quite get the startup space. And they, they talked a big game about it, but they will put candidates in front of us who clearly weren't looking to work in a startup, they were looking for a good job. And that's, that's not the right thing. When you're just starting out, you're trying to build a company, and you're making your very first hires, you've got to get people that really want to be in in a startup want to build a company, and in particular, believe in your company.

Schuyler Brown  
Right? And finding a funding office. You don't I mean, an outsider would think oh, yeah, whatever get at least someplace, not actually that easy to do. How did you approach that?

Jon Stein  
Yes. So for our original office, before we even had funding, I had to sort of on my credit, right, like, you got to sort of put your own name name on the line. And to get that that first lease. This place was was easier, of course, because when we moved in here, we had no, and still have plenty of money in the bank. But I guess, to find this, I looked at 40 spaces. You know, I personally went and saw all these spaces, and I was working with six different brokers. Now, I'm a very hands on sort of person, I like to get out there and see things for myself and others might find it more efficient to do it another way. But in the end, we get the space for now, we won't we'll hope the landlords don't watch but I think we got a good deal. We got about $30 a square foot for a nice you know, loft space, which is a

Schuyler Brown  
Swanky Soho fabulous place.

Eli Broverman  
But by the way, the biggest lie going is square footage on commercial space, every Yep. Every listing you look at has an inflated square footage by sometimes as much as 100%. Right? We really and and when john took me down here, we took the tape measure out and we actually figured it out. Not that that's the be all end all I'm really,

Jon Stein  
really good at pacing off, you know, to actually measure in place, because they'll give you a thing and say, Here's 2000 square feet. You pick sockeye, yeah, this is like, you know, 900 square feet at best. And I would tell them, you know, that that right there? And they said, Yeah, you know, we can see about a reduction, that's just the way it is in the air.

Schuyler Brown  
How did you begin to just get a sense of market prices,

Jon Stein  
just looking at so many, so many spots, and pricing one after another. Now, the trick here, what we found here was this is a place that wasn't really ever on the market. We, you know, we we found it, we identified the building, we said okay, like, these guys don't really work through brokers, they work direct to their tenants. So that's, that's a nice thing. And they, you know, rather than just put the put the place listed, and then we had to sort of compete with other people for it. I came in and I talked to the previous tenants, and they were like, Oh, yeah, we'll try and work out a deal. So you guys get get this place after after we move out. And I knew exactly when they were moving out of this space and, and worked with them and a landlord together to make sure that we would, that we would we would lock it down before it went on the market.

Eli Broverman  
It took time. And and it sort of it's a surprising thing that the CEO should be shopping around for the real estate. And in some ways, you don't really think of that as being part of the CEOs, functions, but you think there's nobody else to do it when you're a small company and, and a lot of ways it's important. The office space is really actually important part of our company culture, having a good comfortable place for everybody to work from a spot that everybody wants to be at. It pays a lot of dividends. So it actually was well worth the space is so important.

Schuyler Brown  
So obviously, you're doing something right. And people believe in your vision.

Jon Stein  
Now they're just they just want to hear this interview.

Schuyler Brown  
So what walk me through how you think about culture?

Jon Stein  
So So the way that we think about it is in in the hiring process, really, I think it's I think a culture is built organically from the people that you have around, you want to have really good people around. And that builds a great culture. And so as we hired folks, some of the questions like we always, we sort of divide up when we have a hiring process where we do a number of different interviews with different people on the team. And one of them is, you know, behavioral focus, and one of them is fit focus, right? And the fit questions that we asked are things like, you know, why better? My why would you want to work here, and people have to say, I mean, it's sort of a no brainer. But people have to say something about why this specific company, what excites them about you know, this job as opposed to just any other startup or any other financial firm. And if you find people who really relate to what you're doing, as I think everyone who works here does, that just means that they're going to think like you and they're going to have some years. And I think that that helps to build the culture, that's, that's what we would want it to be.

Schuyler Brown  
And anything just about, like, you know, team outings that you really focus on just any, any team building things that would be helpful to saga. You know,

Jon Stein  
we, we did a camping trip. And and that was, that was a lot of fun. Earlier earlier in the fall, I went up to New Jersey in the woods, and did I get an overnight out there. And then we went down to Atlantic City The next day, sort of a little bit of a little bit of high and low or a little bit of city and a little bit of country. I guess I think that the important thing, there is just, you know, do some things together, we of course, do do the happy hours, and we do Friday lunches, but give give people a chance to kind of get together on something, it isn't just work.

Eli Broverman  
Free food is the best thing we did. It's nice. It's a great perk, and everybody likes that. But it's also just something to come around, come together just just like it would be for our family. It gives us the excuse to eat a meal together. Or just to talk about where we're going to work from or what we'd like to swap notes, that sort of thing. Yeah, this is this is maybe the best lunch neighborhood in the city, maybe maybe in the country, or Boulder, right, right at the edge of Chinatown and Nolita and so we've got everything.

Schuyler Brown  
I'm pretty jealous. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna throw it out. So let me grab lunch with us. So let's get back to to some of the plumbing issues. When you're hiring. like things like health benefits, nobody tells you about how to manage that process, or outsourcing payroll providers. How did you approach those sorts?

Jon Stein  
We use Eli's mom, yeah, yeah.

Schuyler Brown  
Pitch your mom, man.

Eli Broverman  
Yeah, she's she's available.

Schuyler Brown  
Not like that.

Eli Broverman  
So you know, we didn't really know we're doing it, we were lucky that we had actually just to get going, we had a partner who said, okay, we can put some people on my payroll for the first little while because we actually were working with this company a little bit too. So that made some sense. But we needed to get up and going on our own. And he didn't know where to start, maybe because there are these payroll Provider Services, that that we looked into that sort of give you like HR out of a box, we couldn't even really qualify for them, because they want at least 10 people or something to get on board. So we had to figure it out. It took us a lot longer than I thought it would, I probably made a mistake in sort of trying to over optimize on that ended up, you know, time is money and, and I probably burned too much of my time trying to find the perfect fit. In the end. I mean, we sort of found a way through it. But we had to figure out what's the payroll services out there. And we didn't know we asked around and called other friends, other people that ran companies we call I called my insurance broker, and just ask them, who do you go to for this? And the same with the same with benefits? I mean, you had I'd actually start digging in and understanding how medical insurance works. And I didn't really know what

Schuyler Brown  
were the critical factors that you used to differentiate the providers.

Eli Broverman  
We're just looking for, you know, a plan that was going to be reasonable coverage for reasonable price. And we actually, we went on one of these high deductible plans, which is a good plan for a startup. And the way these plans work is you want practical advice. There's a certain amount that you know, you have to pay off the top, you go to a doctor and you'll pay the full cost, you get a prescription, you'll pay the full cost. It's not a copay, you pay 100% of the amount up to a certain amount. And then after that you pay nothing you pay no copay you the rest of year and it's actually it's a good plan for people who don't actually expect to use a lot of medical services. And that's the case for a lot of younger people who happen to also populate startups.

Schuyler Brown  
That's actually incredibly helpful advice.

Jon Stein  
it. Try. And for payroll we went with,

Eli Broverman  
we went with we went into it, I talked to a bunch of different folks, they had this deficiency. The deal was that whoever we went to, we needed to import this into QuickBooks, because that's how we manage our, our accounts. And so it was a lot easier to cut out another party and just Eric will use them because it'll integrate directly instead of some sort of third party solution.

Schuyler Brown  
Let's talk technology infrastructure. Because once you actually start doing things, right, Marty, you get the marketing equation down, all of a sudden, you have a really serious infrastructure problem in terms of scaling. So how have you manage scaling now that things seem to be firing on all cylinders just work a lot of late nights, it's,

Jon Stein  
it's easy. We, we had a lot more scaling issues then than I anticipated, and growing from, you know, from, from the sort of this system work for like 5000, to the system or for 50,000, present a lot more hurdles than I imagined. Because we have so many processes running in the background, and we process so many transactions, every customer doesn't just like sign up, and then they have an account, and they sort of like login to log into a website. We're like managing securities transactions for them, you know, dividend payouts, and generating statements and all these kinds of things on the back end all the time. And that, that is slow processing. And originally, when we designed it, it was all in batch, right. So we would take every one of our users perform some operation, and then commit all of that to the database, we flushed the transaction at the very end, that took up a huge amount of memory as the customer, customer base grew. And so what we what we had to learn how to do was, do some checks up front, make sure that everything would work out in this batch, then process the batch one at a time and commit those transactions, you know, one user at a time. So we take less memory, and that thing could actually run through quicker, we sped up all of our core processing by a factor of 100. And when we did that, so things that would were starting to take 24 hours, 36 hours, we would get them down into 15 minutes, you know, 10 minutes, just by doing some of these memory optimizations.

Schuyler Brown  
And was that a strategy that you plan for you're just putting out fires as they come up?

Unknown Speaker  
In a sort of, you know, in flow,

Jon Stein  
always, always, always putting out fires. Now we we do plan and we have, you know, bugs for, but we should fix this someday we should fix that someday. But, you know, look, the reality is, there's always more that that you have to do, then you have time to do. And so the way to prioritize is what is causing an issue. Now, today, within a sort of strategic framework. I mean, you don't want to be creating more work for yourself than you have to be. But that's that's just the reality of it is that you have to do those things that are most pressing as they come up.

Schuyler Brown  
One of my favorite questions is, what is the one piece of advice that you would give yourself if you were just starting out all over again?

Jon Stein  
It's gonna take a lot longer than you think it is. It's gonna take a lot longer.

Schuyler Brown  
Is there anything you can do about that as a result, or it's just a material fact? It's just

Eli Broverman  
a fact. Yeah, you just have to be you just have to begin and realize that no matter what you think, no matter what you think the case may be there's a lot more complexity that lies behind it and other you any business is going to rely on other people, other partners outside, things that you can't control and those that that tends to go slow.

Schuyler Brown  
Fair point guys, thanks for being here. I'm Schuyler, Eli and Jon. We've got Betterment. Thanks for watching.

‍

‍