 Thank you so much, and thank you everybody for having me. Really grateful to be here. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Giving Assistant, the social impact company that I was so fortunate to be part of a co-founding member for in 2014. And I realize I don't have an About Me slide, so I'm just going to say it. Hi, I'm Jim. And I joined as the technical co-founder giving assistant in 2014, and now the VP of Engineering. What I'm really excited to tell you a little bit about today is a different perspective on payments. We have used Relief since about 2015, and we have never charged a single credit card, yet we became profitable last year. And we built our company around one single key metric, which is how can we enrich the lives of others? And we do that by paying out. So really what I love to kind of dive into is to really get you thinking about the payment industry, not just about accepting cash, but about pushing it out the door. So if you would, I'd love just to start by, you kind of go down this road with me. Let's think about all the things that we pay for on a day-to-day basis. Consider the last time you reached into your purse or your wallet, you grabbed a couple dollars to pay for this or that. Grabbed a credit card, you did a swipe, or you did an insert. You grabbed your phone, you made a Venmo transfer to your friend, you tapped the PayPal link, or you wrote that gut-wrenching, soul-crushing rent check or watched the mortgage actually hit again, as expected, always on time. However, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics tells us that about 62% of the average American household income has spent on three primary categorizations, housing, transportation, and food. So what do we do with the other two-fifths of our income that we really have left at the end of the day? Now, unless you're an extreme minimalist or like a digital nomad, which if you are, I'd love to talk to you after the conference, because it's really awesome. However, if you fall within that average American sort of criteria, you really have to start considering all those little things that you paid for. So, you know, a couple of examples. I'm a kind of guy that always bring a water bottle with me. Love to say hydrated any chance I can get. Now, let's say I leave work a little bit late, I rush out, I forget my water bottle, I'm like, ah, gotta go pick up a water bottle. That's a couple bucks, right? It's not much, but it starts to add up. I jump on the train, get off the train, get in the car, need gas, go fill up gas, standing there at the pump, pumping, I turn around and I look over in the window and I see all those glorious ships right in the window, where I'm like, man, dinner's in a couple hours and I'm getting kind of hungry. All these things start to add up. You see where I'm going with this. Now, let's kind of advance it a little bit and let's think about this on-demand economy that we have. Everything you can imagine can be delivered to our door by the joys of Amazon and everything likes. If you're from the Bay Area, like me, pretty much anything legal can be delivered in about 10 minutes, which is also another, that's another conversation. However, we really think about all of these things and how they start to add up. We really start to consider all of the different types of stuff we pay money for. Visa recently published a survey that said that the average American spends $11 twice a week on a lunch. Now, $11 will barely buy you a salad that you'll probably regret in San Francisco. Later that day, however, 22 bucks a week times all of the weeks in a year, you're looking at almost $1,200 worth of lunches that you really need. All right, so now some people just say, okay, this is just a newer generation, they're hooked on their phones, they just want to use all this fun tech, stuff that everybody in this room is building, but Charles Schwab recently put out this survey that shows that every generation, since the Great Depression, you've got boomers to Gen Xers and Gen Xers to millennials, everybody continues to spend on these unnecessary items. So why do we keep doing it? Well, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not up here to explain the why. However, I can say that when you take that step now from thinking about all the things that we spend for personally, and now you step into where you are with your company, things that you do, you start to consider, how do I stand apart from all of my competition? I'd like to think that everybody in this room has at least one competitor in their space. So that's just one competitor. When you really start to consider all of the different ways that you want to stand out amongst the crowd, like we all know, we have to get creative. We have to think about how we build our businesses, we have to think about the value add that we're actually going to be able to provide, not just the products and not just the services. But we have to start considering what is it on a personal level? So Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors, and by the way, I just has a fantastic haircut. I love showing a picture of who made a chance I can get. And by the way, this isn't a branding conversation, but this is really critical to our story, which is why I really wanted to explain this piece, is he states that a brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships. That when you put them together, you count for a customer's decision to choose one product or service over another. Now that's a tall statement, I know it's a little late in the day, but hear me out. You take expectations, memories, stories and relationships, which right there, that's just, that's the best of humanity all put together. And you hand that to your consumer and say, hey, pay attention to me, pay attention to me, I'm right here. And then your competitor comes in and they give you theirs. Another competitor comes in, another competitor comes in. What do you think they're gonna choose? Now, for example, for me, I'm a big coffee drinker. I love my coffee, right? I'll go out of the way, I'm happy to go out of the way for a great cup of coffee. Who here in the room? Coffee drinkers, tea, kombucha, something fancy I haven't heard of yet? Okay, that's pretty much everybody, thank you. Now, put in this little thought with me. Picture your favorite brand. Favorite brand of coffee, favorite brand of tea. Get that visual of getting off the train, getting out of your car, walking up to that storefront. Open that door, come in, you get that smell, right? It's kind of intoxicating. You feel comfortable. You look around, you see all the people, you hear the sounds, you look up at that menu that you haven't read in a year because you know exactly what you're getting and what you're walking out with, right? So that is something that that brand pays a lot for. There's nothing wrong with that. They're using their marketing spend, they're putting all of that effort into getting you to be simply a loyal customer. And the concept of loyalty is not new for anybody, but you take a step back and you think, well, that's only if I can afford a storefront. That's only if I have this ability to really give it my all to build this brand and to make it something magic. When I walked in to go get that bottle of water, there's a lot of bottles of water in a really crappy small little fridge. When I'm looking at those bags of chips, while I'm trying to make sure nobody's gonna steal some gas from me, because I just realized I'm hungry, how do I choose? How do I stand out from the crowd? So what I like to present is a theory and something that we proved with giving assistance, but when you give your brand to a customer and you ask them to pay attention to you and then you have another competitor come in and another competitor come in you really wanna stand out. How do you expect them to pay attention to you? However, my theory is, what if your favorite brand can pay you to use their product or service? I love that emoji. I needed to use that emoji, I didn't know how I was gonna use it. I started putting the deck together, it just kind of fit, so okay, we're past that. Moving on, now we're not new to reward driven economy. Back in the 1800s, this company SNH Green Shields was one of the first to introduce this concept of rewards to, I don't know, humanity, at least in recorded history. And by the way, who here just loves searching Google Images for stuff? I came across this and how awesome is that Americana family from the 50s, just all happy around the dinner table collecting stamps. And the concept was simple. As we were all out shopping at different merchants, you would be given a stamp as a reward. You could bring those home and you could collect them and then you could trade them in for socks and clothes and I really don't know what everybody bought in the 50s. But this was a great concept that took over a hundred years before it actually started to catch on. And then when it caught on, it was still just rewards. It wasn't anything to write home about. Now then, fast forward a little bit, William J. Tobin wrote a patent and introduced the very first affiliate marketing concept in the early 1980s. But it would still take another 15 years plus before, excuse me, until Amazon released our affiliate program and everybody started to take note. Because obviously at the time, Amazon was starting to show their authority in the marketplace. Now I just want to explain really quick what this affiliate model is for anybody who doesn't know or just make sure that everybody's on the same page here. Now let's just say you're a fantastic content blogger. Thank you for writing great content. You published this amazing article. You get a reader or a consumer in this case to come in and they see something that they like. So they're gonna tap on that. They're gonna go to that shop. You've just published an affiliate link to this store. When you get to that shop, they do their best to convert you. They do. This consumer says I need this thing in my life. They buy it. It moves into an affiliate network and this affiliate network figures out that you, as the content publisher, referred somebody and they made a purchase. Simple as that. They sent this information back to the merchant. The merchant says yep, I shipped it out the door. All is good with life. I think I'm gonna pay them a little commission for exactly what they just did for me. They send you that cash. Everybody's happy. Now when I first learned about the affiliate marketing kind of ecosystem, it was exciting to me because I saw the potential for not having to build my own store, have my own products and I can still, you know, maybe make a little side income. He was back. I experimented with everything from selling eBooks and Farmville to, wow, did I just say Farmville? Yeah, I did. So I'm going with it. I sell eBooks with Farmville to actually building like a formula and teaching people how to use Facebook ads. This was like when Facebook ad platforms two pages and you didn't need a PhD to actually navigate the UI. Now when I met my co-founders, we had all dabbled in the affiliate space. We'd all dabbled in the e-commerce space and we'd all done something with charity. But we knew it was too big for just any one of us to do alone. So we looked at the market and we realized that by 2025 we're looking at the US retail and travel affiliate spend to be over a trillion dollars. Now that's a lot of cheddar for anybody at a cheese factory. However, we thought, do we just get 1% of that? Maybe? If we do it right? Well, even if we do it wrong, we could get 1% of 1% of it. And we still be looking at an amazing opportunity. But just what if we're able to convert that money and do something philanthropic with it? Now, there's mixed feelings about the affiliate space because everybody just says you're just hoarding links and you're trying to get more people to buy stuff that they don't need. And part of that argument's true. But in a world of capitalism mixed with altruism, it presented a different picture. We told ourselves that if we could actually put this together and make it work, the obvious was simply, we saw that value emerging philanthropy with e-commerce only if we made it easy. Then our answer was simply this, that we could build a platform that shoppers could donate to any nonprofit just by clicking the checkout button that they were already doing. Now, if any of you run a store, you might be thinking, wow, this guy's up here selling black magic. It's not like that at all. What we wanted to do was we wanted to fix one of the top three problems with commerce in general, which is shopping cart abandonment. Talk to any merchant. They know they're tired of having a storefront. Everybody comes in, tries things on and then leaves. They're tired of having a neat commerce site where everybody fills up their shopping cart and they get distracted by the latest social media posts and they bounce. But more importantly, people just want to know that they're having a great deal when they're shopping online. So we found, we weren't the first to introduce the concept of cashback. I will not even get close to saying we were, but we are driving this concept where as you're shopping online, you can just get the best deal in the industry and know that you're doing the best with your money. So now how does this relate to everybody in this room? You're probably thinking, this isn't our problem. We don't want to deal with that. It's not our business model. There's risk involved. There's risk in everything, right? However, the most important one that I hear from everybody is you want me to consider working with other people's money? Why would I want to do that? I'm happy just collecting money with my own system. But the plot twist is if you have a business model right now, you already are working with people's money. You're taking their money. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. Congratulations for having a successful business model. I applaud you. But hear me out. Consider a world where we found this as our opportunity that people love receiving money, don't they? It builds the utmost trust. Whenever you receive a payment from somebody, think of the last time that you received your paycheck. You kind of trust your company when you receive the paycheck, right? You get it early, kind of awesome. It comes late. You're knocking on the door of HR, aren't you? And to be honest, it's nice to give every now and then rather than just to take. So we took all of these concepts, all of these theories, we put them all together, and we decided, OK, we're going to go for it. We launched a coupon website. It was our beachhead into the market. Emblematic of 2014, it was glorious, right? With this massive header with boys dancing, I still don't know why boys were dancing in the header. We had a run-on sentence, which my copywriter just revealed to me that I didn't even notice. Logo is everywhere, and it's a little hard to see with the blowout on the exposure. But the hand is actually gray, and we call it our zombie hand logo because it actually looks like a dead hand holding a heart. It was really fantastic. None of us even saw it until two years later. It's kind of like that FedEx URL. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. So we launched when it was working, and we decided, OK, we're going to launch this cashback loyalty platform. We're going to make it easy for people to just continue to check out. And we wanted to teach people along the way that this is how we were. We wanted to give them those memories and those experiences as we can build them. We're a brand-new startup. This is Silicon Valley Episode 1, right? Jump into our browser extension. We wanted to integrate with their day-to-day life. We wanted to make it as easy as we could. And we said, OK, this is the time. This is how do we make it different? How do we do this innovation? I'm the engineer in the group. I'm trying to think, how can we plug in and do what we want to do best? And we decided we have to come back to our why. And we have to wear our heart on our sleeve. And again, it's a little hard to see with the exposure. But our browser extension, always trying to just lead with the impact that you can have just by using our product. Explaining to people that as you interact with our product, you're generating wealth. You can choose what you want to do with it. And we did that every single step of the way. We would show people that they could pick their favorite nonprofit, and they could give 0% to 100% of anything they earn. They could be passive donors. And they never had to open their credit card other than to purchase what they were already going to purchase. So we started getting users. It was awesome, talking like brand new startup. Everybody's excited, next to no money. Some days you have no idea whether or not you're going to pay yourself. This is, again, Silicon Valley episode one. We started to grow. We started to get users. And people started loving it. And we said, OK, we've got to start paying people. How are we going to do that in a scalable way? Well, engineers in the room, hands up. That's what I expect. Thank you. All right, so engineers, you're right here with me. You know, there's two things that we forcibly never read, documentation and policy. So a fun story, about 2014, I had a Stripe account. And I was playing with my Stripe account, set my debit card up, charged it a buck, worked as advertised, refunded it, worked as advertised. So I was poking around the docs. I wasn't reading them, poking, of course. And I noticed that there was this credit API that allowed you to push money. And I thought, oh, that's cool. It's probably like, you know, like if Uber was using it, that's how they would push money to their drivers or something like that. But they probably had to charge them first. And I was like, well, this could be fun. I'm just going to try to push a dollar to my debit card. So I did it, went to bed, woke up, realized, wait, my Stripe balance went down. And my debit card balance went up. And I was like, oh, I mean, this is because I actually charged myself a minute before. So I got home. I was like, honey, give me your debit card. Anybody who's married or has a partner knows that never really ends well. But she gave me her debit card. I tried it. I'd never put her on the system before. And I was able to credit to her debit card. And I thought, hmm, I wonder, what would happen if we were to charge our company card, makes miles, 10 grand, 20 grand, and then actually just start distributing that money to everybody who would want to tokenize their debit card? I thought, it's kind of crazy, but it could work. Well, it worked. It works so well that for an early-stage startup, we were able to push out almost half a million dollars in our first year to people using their debit cards. At the time, and what everybody was comfortable with, what they considered secure, what they considered convenient, and it was awesome, right? We were growing. We had people raving about us. We had articles being written. It was so exciting, and we actually felt that we were doing some innovation in the industry. Everybody loved it, except one person at Stripe. And that glorious Wednesday, when I checked my email, we got this fantastic notification that it just wasn't going to work out. But what was great about it was it proved that it could work. I had never really thought about payments in a way in this upstream fashion, where you could just link your debit card and technically kind of have a direct pass-through right to a checking account. But we learned a lot from this particular piece. One, we consider it our golden ticket because it gave us the early-stage growth that we really needed to make a dent in the industry. But two, it really gave us the opportunity to understand that options matter to people when it comes to the type of payment that works for them. Now, you can see here this graph, the debit line. That was obviously when we had the most filling out. We had to convert everybody over. That was the time that we switched over to Spreedly. Not everybody re-tokenized their cards, and we've kept it in more of a private release ever since. However, this is the year that we're really seeing more payment forms. So we're expecting that to go right back up. You can see that when we converted from paper checks to e-checks and starting to go out, and then obviously PayPal is our clear winner. We haven't done a lot of different payment options just because of the time involved in the size of my engineering team. But this is the year where we're finally adding more options. Spreedly decides to add Alipay, Payoneer, maybe Venmo. I know there's some brain-treat people here. If those kind of options come out, that's obviously what we're using. So for us, I'm really excited to just say that we're a certified B corporation, and that goes back to our original goal of wearing our heart on our sleeve and just trying to prove that we're in it for the long run. And we're doing it in a way where we're actually still measuring these KPIs on how much we can enrich others. We've processed over $350 million in gross merchandise values since we launched in 2014. And it warms my heart to know that I can actually go to sleep at night knowing that my software is helping to add value to people's lives. As simple and as sappy as that sounds, those are the kind of things that really drive our team to keep innovating and to keep trying. And the most exciting piece that why I'm really here today to talk about is this awesome number, which doesn't really look like a lot, but when you think about it, our system is sent out over 125,000 payments to both our users of our platform and to our nonprofit partners. And these payments can be anything from a dollar to 10 grand. We, again, go back to that idea of the last time you received your paycheck. That's an empowering moment. That's a moment that you realize that you're worth what you say you're worth, regardless of whether or not you think you're overpaid or underpaid, just that concept, that moment that you actually get paid, that recognition. We're giving that to people, loving using Spreely, which is why I'm really excited that they invited me to be here and kind of share the story with everybody. And again, I'm not asking all of you to go and convert your business model to being a social impact company. But what that leads me with is just this thought. So picture your business today, no matter what the dynamics are. Think of the products that you sell. Think of the team that you have. Think of the services you provide. And just consider if I'm your business and you're the end consumer, and I hand you everything that you provide right now, and that competitor comes in, and another competitor comes in, and then the next one that launches on Product Hunt tomorrow that nobody knew it was even existing, and then another and another. How are you gonna stand out? And just picture what your business would look like if you could actually pay others. Because tech companies come and go, as we all know. Engineering is only as good as it's engineers and what we open source and what we innovate on together. But, just but, when you're considering the next innovation for your company, when you're considering what you can add value in other people's lives, consider the impact because our world can use a lot more impact in our innovation. Thank you so much.