Most financial products are built around one question: how do you help people keep, grow, or spend more of their money?
Adam Nash is building around a very different question: how do you help people give it away better?
Nash has spent decades at the center of major consumer technology and fintech shifts. He was VP of Product at LinkedIn through its IPO, President and CEO of Wealthfront, VP of Product at Dropbox, and previously held roles at eBay and Apple. He is also a prolific angel investor, with early investments in companies like Figma, Gusto, Opendoor, Firebase, and more.
Today, he is co-founder of Daffy, a modern donor-advised fund platform designed to make charitable giving easier, more intentional, and more accessible. In the episode, Nash explains why giving has been one of the most underbuilt categories in consumer finance—and why the donor-advised fund may be a much bigger product opportunity than most people realize.
Money Is a Trust Business
Nash’s interest in financial products started early. In college, after earning what felt like a large amount of money from an internship, he quickly realized he had spent far more than expected. That experience pushed him to learn about savings, mutual funds, returns, and financial decision-making.
Over time, that curiosity became a career thesis: technology keeps getting more powerful, but the most interesting products sit at the intersection of rational systems and irrational human behavior.
That lens shaped his work at Wealthfront. Managing people’s money is not just a math problem. It is a trust problem. People are not optimizing spreadsheets in the abstract. They are trying to build lives, care for families, retire comfortably, reduce anxiety, and make decisions they can live with.
For Nash, the lesson was clear: in financial products, the emotional layer matters as much as the technical layer. The product must be accurate, safe, and reliable—but it also has to understand how people actually behave.
What Wealthfront Taught Him About Company-Building
Running Wealthfront gave Nash a broader view of what it takes to build a company beyond product strategy.
His definition of the CEO role is blunt: set the strategy, find the right people to execute it, and make sure they have the resources to succeed. Get those three things right, and a company can survive a lot of mistakes.
He also argues that culture has to be built early. At scale, behaviors are already locked in. The habits, incentives, and standards created in the first phase of a company become incredibly sticky.
That belief extends even to hiring. Nash recalled wanting every candidate—whether they got the job or not—to leave with a clear, positive understanding of what the company did and why it mattered. In his view, every interaction with the company is part of the brand.
The eBay Lesson: Operational Excellence Can Become a Trap
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was Nash’s comparison between eBay and LinkedIn.
At eBay, he saw an extraordinarily disciplined product organization. Roadmaps were prioritized with financial rigor. Hundreds of features were evaluated, scheduled, and shipped with remarkable precision. By conventional business standards, it was an elite execution machine.
But that strength came with a cost.
Nash argues that eBay was wound so tightly around operational efficiency that there was less room for exploration, innovation, and riding new technology waves. The company was great at optimizing the current machine, but that made it harder to reinvent itself.
LinkedIn taught him a different lesson. Reid Hoffman’s deep understanding of network effects shaped Nash’s view of platform-building: the core product matters, but so does planting seeds for the next 10x opportunity. Great companies do not have one story. They compound through multiple waves.
That contrast became part of Nash’s operating philosophy: efficiency is valuable, but if it crowds out experimentation, it can become fatal.
Why Daffy Exists
The idea for Daffy came from Nash’s own experience with donor-advised funds.
After LinkedIn went public, he faced a set of financial decisions around taxes, stock, and charitable giving. His accountant introduced him to donor-advised funds: a structure that lets someone contribute assets, receive the tax deduction, invest the funds tax-free, and later recommend grants to charities.
Nash immediately saw the product as powerful. But he also saw how inaccessible it felt. Donor-advised funds had historically been associated with wealth managers, high-net-worth individuals, and legacy financial institutions. Most people who give to charity regularly had never heard of them.
That was the opening for Daffy.
Nash describes a donor-advised fund as something like a 401(k), IRA, wallet, or even HSA for charity. The idea is simple: put money aside for giving when it is financially convenient, then donate later when inspiration or need arises.
That separation matters. Giving usually involves two hard questions at once: how much can I afford to give, and where should I give it? Bundling those decisions together creates friction. Daffy’s goal is to split them apart.
Giving Is Emotional, Not Just Financial
One of Nash’s strongest product beliefs is that the best consumer products touch people emotionally, not just rationally.
He points to Apple as a company that understood this deeply. Photos are not just files. They are memories, children, family, and life history. The best products understand the human meaning underneath the task.
Daffy applies the same logic to giving. Charitable giving is not just a tax optimization problem. It is tied to values, family, identity, religion, schools, community, disasters, causes, and the desire to help.
That emotional insight shaped Daffy’s product decisions. The company launched mobile-first, supported crypto, added donor-advised fund transfers after users immediately requested them, and built features like family plans that let children, spouses, siblings, parents, and grandparents participate in giving.
The family plan example is especially revealing. In wealth management, people talk constantly about multi-generational giving, legacy, and family values. But most donor-advised funds were still structured like individual or joint brokerage accounts. Daffy asked a simple product question: why doesn’t giving have a family plan like every other modern consumer subscription?
That led to a feature where families can give together, children can recommend donations, and charitable giving can become a dinner-table conversation.
The Business Model Bet: Membership Fees Over AUM
Traditional donor-advised funds often charge fees based on assets under management. Nash argues that this model makes sense for investment products, but not necessarily for giving.
The work required to administer a very large account is not thousands of times greater than the work required to administer a smaller one. Yet AUM-based pricing naturally biases the product toward wealthy users.
Daffy’s contrarian move was to charge a membership fee instead. That supports the company’s broader ambition: make donor-advised funds useful not just for the ultra-wealthy, but for the tens of millions of American households that already give to charity each year.
The product is not trying to convert non-givers into givers. It is trying to help people who already give do it more consistently, more intentionally, and with less friction.
Are Donor-Advised Funds Just Warehouses for the Rich?
We raised one of the strongest critiques of donor-advised funds: that they allow wealthy people to park money, get tax benefits, and delay actually sending funds to charities.
Nash’s response was nuanced. He acknowledged that the concern is technically possible, especially at extreme wealth levels. If policymakers want to create rules or caps for very large accounts, he is open to that conversation.
But he argues the critique is distorted by an obsession with billionaires. Most people using donor-advised funds are not trying to warehouse billions. They are giving to schools, religious organizations, local causes, national nonprofits, and global crises.
He also points to payout behavior. According to Nash, Daffy’s own numbers show that more than half of contributed funds are granted out to charities the following year. His larger point: focus on the average use case, not just the most sensational edge case.
The Angel Investing Framework
The episode also goes deep on Nash’s angel investing philosophy.
He has invested in roughly 160 to 170 companies over 14 or 15 years, but he does not treat angel investing as casual check-writing. He runs it more like a personal venture portfolio, deciding how much of his overall assets he is willing to allocate to startups, then pacing that capital over a decade.
That decade-long view matters. Seed investing takes a long time. The best companies may take 10 years or more to reach liquidity. Many angels get excited in year one or two, then realize in year three that none of the money is coming back yet.
Nash looks for a few things. First, he wants to understand why the founder is talking to him specifically. If the answer is just money, that is not compelling. He wants to add value through relevant expertise in product, fintech, marketplaces, social, or growth.
Second, he listens for distribution. A product insight is not enough. The founder needs a credible path to reach customers and build a venture-scale company.
Third, he looks for founder-market fit. Not just “this founder found a way to make money,” but “this founder cares about this problem enough to spend a decade on it.”
The Venture Paradox: Saying No Sounds Smart
Nash also offered one of the sharpest lines in the episode: in venture, it is easy to sound smart by saying no.
There are always reasons a startup will fail. The market is too small. The timing is wrong. The team is incomplete. Distribution is too hard. The product is too early. Saying no can make an investor look disciplined in the short term.
But in the long term, nobody remembers the companies you correctly passed on. Returns come from the moments when you said yes.
That has shaped how Nash thinks about founders. Some of his best investments came from founders who convinced him he was wrong. Dylan Field did that with Figma. Nash initially questioned whether cloud-based graphics tools were ready, but Field had a deeper view of GPUs, bandwidth, latency, WebGL, and why the market would move.
The pattern he now looks for: a founder who has gone deeper into a market than he has, and can change his mind.
The Big Takeaway
This episode is not just about Daffy or donor-advised funds. It is about how great products emerge when founders understand both the rational and emotional sides of human behavior.
Wealthfront was about trust. LinkedIn was about networks. eBay was a lesson in the limits of operational precision. Daffy is about turning generosity into a better-designed habit.
The most provocative idea is that charitable giving may be one of the last major consumer financial behaviors still waiting for a truly modern product experience.
People already want to give. The question is whether the product makes it easy enough, intentional enough, and meaningful enough for them to do it more often.
That is the bet behind Daffy: the next great fintech product might not help people keep more money.
It might help them give it away.
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Chapters:
00:01 - Introducing Adam Nash and Daffy’s Mission
02:20 - Adam’s Origin Story: Money, Family, and Human-Computer Interaction
05:24 - Fintech Before “Fintech” Had a Name
06:16 - What Wealthfront Taught Adam About Trust, Culture, and CEO Leverage
10:15 - Operator Playbooks from Apple, eBay, LinkedIn, and Beyond
11:27 - LinkedIn vs. eBay: Network Effects, Operational Excellence, and Missed Waves
15:28 - From Wealthfront to Greylock, Dropbox, and the Daffy Idea
18:00 - Donor-Advised Funds Explained and Why Daffy Exists
22:27 - The 401(k), IRA, or Wallet for Charity
25:03 - Daffy’s Business Model: Membership Fees Over AUM
27:11 - Product Innovation in Giving: Transfers, Family Plans, Crypto, APIs, and Private Stock
32:54 - The Donor-Advised Fund Critique: Warehousing Money or Unlocking Giving?
37:57 - Teaching Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford
41:37 - Adam’s Angel Investing Framework After 160+ Startups
43:54 - Why Seed Investing Takes a Decade
46:12 - Founder-Market Fit, Distribution, and Knowing Why You’re on the Cap Table
48:28 - The Venture Paradox: Saying No Sounds Smart, Saying Yes Makes Returns
50:37 - Figma, Dylan Field, and Founders Who Change Adam’s Mind
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:00:58.278): Hey everyone welcome back to the Ignite Podcast today we're delighted to have Adam Nash on the mic he spent two decades building consumer financial products people actually use he was VP of product at LinkedIn through his IPO president and CEO of Wealthfront and VP of product at Dropbox with earlier stops at eBay and Apple since 2011 he's been one of Silicon Valley's most active angels early in Figma Gusto Opendoor Firebase and many others in 2020 he co-founded Daffy the donor advised fund for you which crossed a billion dollars in charitable assets in about four and a half years pretty amazing thanks for coming on, Adam. Yeah, Brian, great to be here yeah and so I, I put you on the spot before and said hey we actually know each other I interviewed at Wealthfront 10 years ago didn't get the job but I uh, you know, had a real good time in the interview process I remember it being like.
Adam Nash (00:01:43.501): A really fun interview well I, I'm glad it was a good experience I mean, well film was a very special moment it was one of the really early companies that managed to scale in fintech and um I was a big believer I still am that culture is so important and so I, you know, the process of how you bring people on board I think tends to be underappreciated by a lot of operators but it's this one window you have to kind of introduce people to the company and culture and.
Brian Bell (00:02:11.190): You have to remember that every person you talk to whether or not they get.
Adam Nash (00:02:13.993): The job has an impression of your company and so you're, you know, similar to my advice on building brands and products, you know, very often people don't think enough about the people who haven't used their product yet versus their active users so yeah.
Brian Bell (00:02:27.065): And I told uh, you know, I had such a good interview experience and went on to do other things, you know, leading AI at Amazon and and working at Microsoft so I'd it's not like I set back my career not getting the job but I had a really good experience and I remember just telling people from then on about Wealthfront I was like, you know, when people would talk about finance or investments and check out Wealthfront so yeah that, that positive experience kind of probably paid some dividends and probably got some customers from my network over the years.
Adam Nash (00:02:53.003): Yeah, that's actually great to hear like I said it was it's one of my long-standing kind of startup kind of building a brand and culture things as I always told the head of recruiting and, you know, all the hiring managers that like I want everyone leaving the company whether or not they get the job understanding what we do and why we do it and feeling good about the company.
Brian Bell (00:03:10.404): Yeah, that's amazing it's so funny to cross paths again but I'd love to just start with uh what's your origin story and background? Well, there's there's a lot.
Adam Nash (00:03:16.974): Of versions of that I mean, I, I have pretty diverse interests although I think that if you look at my LinkedIn profile it looks pretty standard um, you know, software engineer, you know, builds a career in Silicon Valley going from one tech wave to another but, you know, when you mentioned fintech and, you know, financial products in general when I look at that I mean, it goes back a long ways, you know, I remember my grandmother retired while I was in college and no one ever really had taught me about money and so I remember my first internship where I actually earned some money I think I earned about twenty two hundred dollars a month which at the time was an unbelievable sound yes that's yeah and then what happened is, you know, I went through the the fall quarter and then, you know, after buying a new computer probably for too much money and uh, you know, a little speddy here and there I realized after Thanksgiving I had less than a thousand dollars left and I was like oh my god like I, I can't believe I went through all that money and so I started on this process of learning about money and my grandmother I just retired she was into certificates of deposit and she was the type of person who did their taxes just with their just pencil and paper all the calculators by hand she was amazingly gifted that way and she taught, you know, in school and so started learning about mutual funds and returns and, you know, all these different things I actually talk about her a bit I teach.
Brian Bell (00:04:33.200): This class at Stanford now personal finance for engineers it's based on some of those.
Adam Nash (00:04:37.300): Learnings but, you know, when I, I think about it academically I ended up focusing my graduate school on on human computer interaction which is really just the study of, you know, the rational which is computers right ones and zeros and, you know, will always do the same thing and and humans that, you know, you know, we have emotions we have opinions about things and so I just built a career that was always on this intersection of computers get more and more powerful every year what are problems that people have that all of a sudden now computers can tackle or that people are willing to trust them with and so that, that led me through kind of the personal computer era into, you know, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and then fintech but the truth is I've always cared a lot about personal finance I think that money impacts our lives more than we like to give it credit for um and I don't just mean dollars and cents of what you can afford it's are you happy how do you live your life what do you spend your money on your loved ones, you know, what life do you want to build and I think so many financial decisions end up impacting things we care about but we don't think about it we don't have that intentionality and so not surprisingly I think that, you know, when this last fintech boom happened and I met great founders who were building companies in the space I, I got the itch I was an EIR at Graylock and I remember meeting the folks at Wealthfront and going like I think there's something special here I think we can build something that's meaningful for people and, you know, here we are 15 years later.
Brian Bell (00:05:56.913): Yeah, and it's still around right yeah of course I, I just saw.
Adam Nash (00:06:00.038): The numbers it's amazing to me I think that there's almost one and a half million people now who trust their finances with Wealthfront I mean, they're almost at a hundred billion dollars I mean, these numbers just seemed ludicrous you have to understand and in 2012 mostly there wasn't even a term fintech um it's one of the reasons there was an opening for me to talk to so many great founders but, you know, that idea most fintechs at the time had built these platforms and they managed to get people to trust them with maybe 20 million 30 million 40 million they all seem to hit a wall they'd get these early adopters and then they couldn't go farther and so seeing companies like Wealthfront scale to where they are now not just Wealthfront Robinhood Acorns Coinbase, you know, and crypto really makes me feel good about the fact that we're now using technology to help people with their money.
Brian Bell (00:06:44.554): Yeah, that's pretty amazing what did running a company like that, that manages billions and billions of dollars of other people's dollars uh what did it teach you that a product being.
Adam Nash (00:06:52.866): A product exec never could that's a good question uh there's two angles to that, you know, I think that when I went to wealth I think I really believe strongly was at its heart money is a trust business right, you know, like I said money is rarely the thing that people are focused on like that's not their goal in life there are a few people who have that life but for most people it's a means to an end but it's a trust business and it's emotional I believed heavily in behavioral finance and so actually a lot of, you know, I got to Wealthfront we were very small when I when I went to Wealthfront I'd been one of the early customers actually that's how they found me but uh, you know, I, I think it was about 80 million in assets at the time but I was a very big believer in building cultures and companies that you you have to build the right behaviors when you're small because when you're big you don't have time to right like things are locked in and so I was always very focused on that, that was very though kind of like building a company like a product so I think that's a direct lesson from being a product executive as you realize that, you know, the bare bones of what you put into a product when it's early even that MVP are amazingly sticky and durable and and getting those bones right are really the difference between, I think, talented product designers doing that kind of zero to one problem versus the one to many. But I don't know, I loved jumping in. One of the reasons I wanted to be a CEO is because I think that product strategy is only one of a handful of strategies you have to get right to build a truly great platform and organization right you have the product strategy but there's also a people strategy who are the right people to build and run and operate this organization what culture do you put in place who do you hire how do you train them what are you going to reward over time um there's a technology strategy right like your engineer you realize that technology is continent, you know, moore's law metcalf's law all these laws that we have about scaling and and growth are reality for the industry and I had been at some companies that didn't do a great job of riding those next waves of technology and so you have a technology strategy as well as a people and product strategy and then of course, you know, being on the venture side what's the financial strategy why why are investors going to fund this ride for you like how are you gonna what are the proof points along the way that you will scale to get to the point where you can actually build the kind of business that will fund itself on an ongoing basis not just for years but for decades so I really love jumping in to do all those things I remember I got asked once and in all hands, you know, it's classic kind of we were doing college recruiting so it's right I call it I, I actually love it because there's always one or two folks who are not afraid to ask the hard question and so I got the question once it was like what does.
Brian Bell (00:09:31.744): A CEO do now what would you say your job is yeah actually yeah.
Adam Nash (00:09:35.727): As it turns out there's hundreds of things and if you're doing startups there's there's no job too small for you I always look around like, you know, at some point I'm fixing the Wi-Fi and making sure that like you're doing all the little things in the beginning but my answer at that time was, you know, I said at the highest level I think CEOs of startups do three things I think they set the strategy for the company they find the right people to execute on that strategy and then they make sure that the team has the resources to execute right and at some level if you get those three things right you can do a hundred other things wrong and move along but that probably just reflects my philosophy about how you build organizations that, you know, stand the test of time.
Brian Bell (00:10:15.353): That's amazing how much wisdom I mean, I could tug on any one of those those sentences that you just said but I wanted to ask, you know, you've worked along under and alongside some famous operators whose playbook did you steal and who did you just deliberately throw out.
Adam Nash (00:10:29.255): Well, it's interesting because I actually have seen a lot of amazing players I mean, I started my career I had so many internships but I started my career full-time at Apple and so it's hard to although at the time I will tell you Apple was not everyone's dream comparison I mean, there were some people who loved Apple but this was the era of Businessweek cover like, you know, the black cover like the the fall of an american icon or the death of an american free ipod post, you know, I actually had a roommate when I took the job who who bet me that within five years Apple was going to be bankrupt so it was that's how dark the time was but and then you had, you know, like companies like eBay, you know, other startups etc but, you know, I think that mostly I mean, LinkedIn was a really formative experience for me I mean, reid hoffman is really a generational strategist in in a number of ways but his intrinsic understanding of kind of network effects businesses and how you build these platforms I think that for me I, I've always looked at the way you ride these waves is you're building out the core product and you're adding value customers but to build that business and platform what are the seeds that you're always planting for that next wave where's the next 10X going to come from because it's never one story right and and and so much of what I learned at LinkedIn was really in direct contradiction to what I'd seen at eBay I mean, eBay's an amazing company a platform I still use eBay I still know people at eBay and and uh I have so many strong feelings and positive feelings about the platform and what it enabled but when I also look at it I, I can't help it I'm a product guy I also think about what might have been what could have been and when I think about my time when I was at eBay it was my first internet product management role was at eBay I'd done really computer software before at PC.
Brian Bell (00:12:10.284): And servers they're also well known for having an amazing product org there at eBay historically especially during the time you were there.
Adam Nash (00:12:16.651): That's right it was amazing but it was great at one thing I would describe it as being fantastically great from an operational standpoint I would call, you know, there's product excellence there's operational excellence there's service excellence eBay's product org was really focusing on operational excellence right it I cannot tell you how every cost every efficiency every developer day um that roadmap that went out the prioritization I was as I rose in the ranks I was on a group a committee that every week met for hours going through over 600 different features that were prioritized based on an NPV that was uniform across the projects dollars and cents finance coordinated and by the way had it had a ship date on it and I will tell you I was there 99% plus features met their ship date like if it said if I said it was going to launch on december 12th it was going to launch on december 12th by every MBA standard I just went to a reunion but but by every business standard by every operational standard standard was unbelievable I mean, semiconductor companies are probably more efficiently run but just just barely it wow but then what went wrong and to me some of the product lessons I talk about this when I talk about different product lessons where did it go wrong where did that operational excellence it was wound so tight from a people standpoint and from a technology standpoint there wasn't a lot of room for exploration and innovation not a lot of room for riding, you know, those next technology waves I mean, the truth is our industry is brutal every five years the reason every founder lives under the the fear of if I was starting this company today what would I do differently is because every five years or so the game really does change like was the best solution is no longer the best solution what was the right approach is no longer the right approach and so when I look at eBay like they were wound so tight it made it very difficult for them to ride the upcoming waves I mean, you kind of saw that and so that affected a lot of of how I thought, you know, going into LinkedIn and and, you know, Wealthfront Dropbox, you know, all these other companies every company one thing I love about Silicon Valley is that no matter how great the companies are and every wave there's always a bunch of people who are making the of all the things that the company did wrong and how they do it differently and say hey next time we're going to do it better which is why frankly it's just a brutal industry in some ways right like this is why every five to ten years, you know, the the companies we previously celebrated as best in class all of a sudden are on their heels right, you know, from the next wave of companies because of that relentless growth mindset not just around the product and technology but how to build better organizations how to build better software I mean, we're going through one right now which is unbelievable.
Brian Bell (00:14:53.838): Right, so let's close the loop on wealth front to to Daffy because I want to kind of there was a like a four-year period there what are you up to it's the late 2010s and how did you get involved with with Daffy well I mean,.
Adam Nash (00:15:04.461): After I handed off wealth front back to Andy I ended up going to Graylock as an EIR I'd been there before I, I, you know, people have mixed feelings about these roles in venture capital firms and it seems like every year there's.
Brian Bell (00:15:16.764): For anybody listening who doesn't know what that what is an e.
Adam Nash (00:15:19.225): Actually, that's a great question because nor it's kind of an entrepreneur in residence or in some cases an executive in residence it can go either way but fundamentally you're sitting there with a lot of smart people and you're meeting with a lot of founders I'm an active angel investor so investing as well well and actually I met a lot of great founders in that turn I think it was in 2017 or 2018 met the folks at Bitwise became kind of an investor advisor there and a number of other companies but uh but fundamentally it gives you time to sit there and think you have a lot of smart people around you you see the frameworks when you're in an operational role when you're building a company you have to be heads down like you you just don't have as much time as you'd like to look around and think hey if I was starting with a blank sheet of paper what would I do today and so I spent about a year a little bit more thinking about different ideas and things to do next Dropbox had just gone public and so I jumped in there the Graylock company jumped in there to help drew on the product side ended up taking up growth too at I think at one point I had about 90 of the revenue rolling up to me trying to figure out what their next generation would be but I just had an itch I'm still working on the ideas and and different companies I had this list of ideas going back to Wealthfront days even before of great financial products that hadn't been reinvented yet and actually turned out the donor advised fund was one of those products and so I just had some trouble in the beginning thinking about how do you turn this into a venture class opportunity but yeah I, I know it sounds surprising but what happened was the pandemic happened I had left Dropbox already to work on a startup the pandemic happened, you know, Mike co-founder and I we've been talking for years about doing a company together he was one of my favorite engineers to work with at LinkedIn back in the day nice and we decided to take the leap in the middle of 2020 to actually start what is now called Daffy so here we are five years later.
Brian Bell (00:17:04.410): Amazing, and so I kind of get a donor advised fund Daffy tell U.S. What that is what is a donor advised fund what did why a startup around it what was kind of broken there and yeah tell U.S. The whole story.
Adam Nash (00:17:15.538): Yeah, well I, you know, the name you can blame me for yeah you have an engineer naming things yeah it's gonna be on the nose I thought it was a good app name though but the donor advised fund for you I, I really liked just the simplicity of it and also because I was actually a true believer I had discovered the donor advised fund before wealth front actually when I was at LinkedIn when LinkedIn went public, you know, like a lot of people all of a sudden had a lot of financial decisions to make made the good decision to hire a professional accountant really talented and one of the things he said was, you know, well the taxes are going to be a serious issue here, you know, have you thought about charitable giving right in this money I said well like a lot of people I believe in charitable giving but I hadn't given a lot of thought to, you know, well who would I give this much money to and how would I think about it and LinkedIn was one of these companies where the the lock expired in november so there wasn't a lot of time and so as a result um he said have you heard of a donor advised fund like most people I hadn't but he was like you take some of the stock you put it away cuts your tax bill money's invested tax-free and you have time to actually figure out what your strategy is about giving and so that really sat with me it was I always thought the donor advice was an amazing financial product and so the the real insight for Daffy was just really thinking of it that way, you know, most people think of giving as something purely it's almost I don't want to say it's cultural but it's moral it's ethical we, we teach our children to give like I was raised to believe that it's not all for you right that, that that some of what you earn etc goes back to to those less fortunate than yourself and.
Brian Bell (00:18:46.387): So, I love working out can't you just put it into a trust and give it to your family tax-free and.
Adam Nash (00:18:50.530): There are many options as it turns out but no I, you know, and that struck a chord with me because I will tell you one of those challenges in fintech all software products is that especially in the consumer space is, you know, engineers and MBAs don't have a lot in common but but what one thing that they have in common is they love numbers very left-brained very rational they like to go through the logic deductive etc I find that the best way to design products are really stick with people right that are really meaningful if you want to build a brand not just rationally but irrationally this is one of the things that Apple actually gets right consistently and has over decades it's good to work in an area and go to the where the heat is what are the emotions behind it why do we care I mean, our photos aren't just photos those are your children when they were young right those are those are the those are memories that's that's a life lived I Apple always had a way of getting to the heart and its design culture of what really touched people and the same thing is true in financial products and so when I saw giving I was like this is actually at the heart of it giving is more than just a financial goal it's not just a budget line item and so that juxtaposition of the rational which is wait, you know, the average 50 to 60 million american households give to charity every year everyone's trying to figure out how much they can afford when they can give it they're asked all the time there's probably a lot of lessons in personal finance about how to make people more generous how to help people with their giving but also on other side how do you make it more meaningful why do people get how do you touch my mind when I look at Daffy some of our best feature ideas have actually come from that emotional side of really asking the question how does giving fit in people's life I mean, the dollars and cents are exciting and I love rolling out features, you know, where people can build portfolios and it's automatically rebalanced and it's multi custodian all these different things that we do I think are fantastic but a lot of things I think we got right from day one was actually just talking about the emotions talking about why people give why it's meaningful to them all the different traditions around it and then saying hey how do we turn this into software how do we turn this into an app into a product that people can use and so anyway I love that process.
Brian Bell (00:20:56.249): So, yeah explain how it works is it basically it sounds like it almost kind of works like Wealthfront for nonprofits tell U.S. Like kind of what it is yeah.
Adam Nash (00:21:02.979): The donor advice fund is a really simple product right and so um and most people are surprised and and we can't take credit for inventing it donor advice funds have been around in the U.S. For almost 100 years I think the first one dates back to like 1931 for most people though it became big when the the giants fidelities the schwabs the vanguard started rolling it out in in the early 90s so it's been about 30 years but the truth is most most people haven't heard of it right if you don't have a high-end wealth manager um financial advisor or an accountant um you probably hadn't heard of it but the donor advice fund is almost exactly what you want right, you know, so giving is two hard problems right how much can I afford to give and then who do I give it to the donor advised fund is kind of like a 401k for charity it says okay, you know, that you give regularly right put money aside when it's convenient for you in this special account you get the tax deduction right away for for giving money to charity the money's invested tax-free and then whenever you're inspired to give you just name the charity and the donor advised fund, you know, sends.
Brian Bell (00:22:04.345): The money off so yeah it's like basically like a like an IRA for giving.
Adam Nash (00:22:08.673): Yeah, it's like an IRA for giving some people in the technology think I think of it more as like a wallet for charity you can you can think of it as a number of different ways but it turns out intermediation has this value right and the value of charitable giving is really large because very often the times where you have.
Brian Bell (00:22:26.266): The inclination to put money aside for charity as a budgeting kind of financial goal.
Adam Nash (00:22:31.470): Is different than when someone great products simple it's just separating out problems so that you can tackle them one by one right like not you don't you don't bombard the user with all the things they have to figure out at once right like you it's a journey right through the product and learning and so I think donor advised funds do the same thing for charitable giving for millions of people and so the space has been growing rapidly but no one had really taken the approach of saying how do we turn this into a great product most of the incumbents just treat it as an attach rate feature.
Brian Bell (00:23:13.584): For their advisory platform it's just another account with with stocks and bonds.
Adam Nash (00:23:17.265): In it right it's just another account right and and so they have, you know, individual they have joint yeah yes you can have stocks and bonds and funds it's kind of like a 401k they have pools but they're surprisingly not built for giving and and by the way I don't fault the incumbents for this it's not their business model they, they all picked a business model they borrowed from their investment side where they charge a percentage of assets which by the way is a great business model for some businesses as you mentioned Wealthfront uses that business model but it turns out that the problem with that business model for giving is really that money is very non-linear right it it it, you know, we all know and so if you make money it turns out the work you have to do for a billion dollar account isn't a thousand times more than a million dollar account let alone a thousand dollar account I mean, the average american gives you're talking about a a few hundred dollars a few thousand dollars a year to a handful of charities and so I, I really thought that, that was the opening to build a great product not just for the ultra wealthy but for everyone for those 50 to 60 million american households give to charity every year and it felt like the donor advice when you're building a financial product I think the regulatory framework is incredibly important we weren't going to invent a new account for this the donor advised fund was already there and so I mean, in some ways you stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, that a lot of people came up with the donor advise fund figured out what you could do with it I think we just took it into the 21st century, you know, I mean, when we launched Daffy there wasn't even a fully functional donor advised fund in the app store in 2021, you know, and so um we launched mobile first we launched with support for things like crypto that most of the incumbents didn't support and the biggest difference is we launched with a really unique business model where instead of charging a percentage of assets like a lot of non-profits we just charge a membership fee.
Brian Bell (00:25:04.740): Fascinating, so let's talk a little bit about there wasn't a lot of product innovation to be done it sounds like on the account creation side maybe a little bit on the investments like where the money goes while it's waiting to be donated but you said you innovated a lot on the product side on on the giving maybe you could talk a little bit more about.
Adam Nash (00:25:23.418): That yeah I mean, well, you know, you have to be uh this industry is humbling always being being a product leader is always humbling because you're you're lucky if you're half right you have a bunch of ideas I used to joke that you have 10 good ideas and winning that to the great ones that actually work in the market that you ship and then you're lucky if it's it's one or two out of ten that's why you have to iterate that's why you have to.
Brian Bell (00:25:44.170): Yeah, do you have a a story about that where you built something over your career and you were just so excited about it but nobody like it just flopped I mean,.
Adam Nash (00:25:52.696): So, many great features I just I like to think in some cases they were just early because timing actually matters but but in many cases there's so many pieces actually some of the reason I became known as a growth guy right like I, you know, right LinkedIn was that generation of companies Web 2.0 LinkedIn facebook they were the first companies to have a growth team instead of just marketing for user acquisition.
Brian Bell (00:26:13.783): Which became very sophisticated over time some of the LinkedIn growth stuff is just outstanding when we had to figure it out.
Adam Nash (00:26:19.932): But we had to figure it out when I think of all the features like growth is one of those areas where you have to get covered with most of your feature ideas not working and some of them are are very counterintuitive um when you roll them out but no like when I think of Daffy and I, I think of the things that we've iterated on it actually turned out what we were wrong about was um actually was very funny I thought this was a market expanding product I thought when we launched the MVP I was very the wealthy people who have financial advisors and are using the incumbents we're not for them we're for the other 50 million americans who who just want to put aside 10 a week 25 a month they give a few hundred dollars to charity it's meaningful and we could build a great I'd been on the board of a company called Acorns Acorns has millions of customers now who use Acorns to help them lead better financial lives and just off a few dollars a month and then of course we launched the product and immediately within the first few days we get this request well can I move I've been doing a lot of money from my existing donor advised fund we hadn't built it we didn't even know if it was possible we go into this crash sprint to figure out how to do that good news is it's not very hard to do and we actually shipped it within a couple weeks so we got it out there but, you know, the truth is last four years this space is so open there's been so little innovation at scale um we kind of have been running the table I mean, every year we, we've rolled out easily four to six meaningful I think innovations I mean, I'll give an example but this will sound trivial to you and for most people in tech but it turns out, you know, everyone in the charitable space knows that it's about families and giving if you talk to the Morgan Stanley's and Goldman Sachs of the world they'll talk about multi-generational giving they'll talk about wealth transfer they'll talk about legacy all these incredible things and yet every donor advisement out there is like do you want an I mean, I'm sorry I'm a father of four I, I feel like I have a lot of these like netflix Apple xbox I mean, I have three kids myself.
Brian Bell (00:28:11.702): So, yeah I can relate yeah yeah and so and we said why why would.
Adam Nash (00:28:14.927): You can add up to actually 24 different people to your plan and you as the organizer you funding the account you you still control it fundamentally, you know, you can have siblings you can have parents grandparents giant groups maybe it's an honor of someone else um I have all four of my children on the account and it's fantastic when I my wife and I make a donation it becomes a subject of dinner conversation right something to talk about to teach them and then my children can actually make recommendations in the end my wife and I can either approve those or reject them or or modify them it's kind of like Amazon requests but um I know this sounds awesome. You look at it and you go, why doesn't everyone else have it? But those are famous last words. It just comes from the perspective. We've rolled out APIs. We've rolled out custom portfolios. We've rolled out support for private stock. I mentioned crypto before. All these different features but every one of them came from the same place which is just looking at our members listening to them thinking about why they give what was meaningful to them and saying hey in the modern world how would you turn this into a feature how would you build that into the product rather than have it be something that people do on their own I always like to make products a little bit more than just a tool right they are tools but but fundamentally I like to think about the entire experience that people have around using them it was one of the things I learned the hard at eBay, you know, in the early days for Web 1.0 so many web products in the beginning were so focused on the one task they did they didn't really think about the broader set of tasks what the what the user was actually trying to get done so and we've just been like I said it's it's been a lot of fun yeah innovating in a space where you feel like when you do something right it encourages more generosity I mean, that's the mission of the whole organization is to help people be more generous more often amazing.
Brian Bell (00:30:05.570): So, there's been some contrarian takes online that, you know, donor advised funds get attacked as warehouses where rich people park their money and never give it away uh steel man that, that argument and then tell me.
Adam Nash (00:30:16.177): Where they're wrong well I think, you know, I think I think where it comes from is just this current fixation on billionaires I mean, I, I don't I don't even know if people really focused on what that word means and the number of people involved etc but, you know, you find out that Peter Thiel has billions in his his roth IRA and then everyone wants to change policies around IRAs and that sort of thing but, you know, to steal my argument it's like it's technically possible right like you can put a lot of assets into a donor advised fund.
Brian Bell (00:30:44.589): And have it compound a half million into the next few years and decades and.
Adam Nash (00:30:48.034): So, I can totally understand why some people say hey that feels like a hole in the system we should plug it for billionaires and then my argument against it really is too flat I mean, the first and foremost I would say like listen you may have opinions about what you can and can't do with an IRA but let's not forget that for tens of millions of americans that's an important part of their retirement savings and their goals they're not billionaires and so do not throw out the baby with the bathwater so so if you're gonna have a regulation around that and you want to cap it at some certain level or if you want to have restrictions once it gets to a certain size willing to listen like that makes sense but most people don't put away billions they don't have the capacity to do it right, you know, most people they're giving to they're giving to a religious organization they belong to they're they're giving to a cause they, they're not they're not trying to squirrel away money forever and so I really do like encourage people to focus on the vast vast vast majority of americans who who who need a better system for how they give but the second thing, you know, the argument I have is that the data just doesn't support it I mean, like they run this data every year I mean, I know everyone's worried well foundations have this requirement to give away five percent their assets every year endowments have rules about how much they have to put through their cause but every number every year I've ever seen for donor advised funds shows that the number is much much higher I think last year in the industry was something like 24 percent that maybe that's a 2024 number I'm not sure I don't get it right but but fundamentally um I mean, at Daffy it's over 50 percent wow right like in terms of how much money people put aside in year one and then the next year how much of that goes out the door to charities 55 was our number from 2025 and so I just think when I look at policy problems I'm saying like what what problem are you actually solving here right, you know, and and so um I would be asking more questions personally about foundations and endowments and and what they're doing but I think that the secret actually just turns out that we get distracted by the ultra wealthy it's like celebrity fascination for most people giving matters to them but we are all busy we, we have work we have home life we have family we have social life we have so many things going on the truth is is that giving is one of those tasks that isn't a daily task for most people and so what happens is when someone asks you to give right Marisol's and it's and and the difference that they're making and so I, I I just happen to be a believer that having separate accounts I mean, I teach this class like I said.
Brian Bell (00:33:46.946): On personal finance yeah I was gonna ask about that mental accounting is.
Adam Nash (00:33:50.647): A real thing goal setting is a real thing there is research that says that if you set a goal pre-commitment for your giving you give 32 percent more wow I mean, I believe that it's true but it's true for all financial tasks I mean, how many of U.S. Would put money away for retirement reliably if it didn't just come out of the paycheck I mean, that's why automatic that's why these things make sense that's why financial advisors will talk to their their clients about their goals for retirement and then turn that into a number a savings goal etc all these things work so I think that, you know, for folks um who get fascinated with donor advisements etc I always encourage them to think of of of what actually the average use case is and not just think about, you know, what you read about whatever whatever billionaire you're worried.
Brian Bell (00:34:34.663): About right now is is doing yeah that's amazing are you still teaching personal finance for engineers at Stanford.
Adam Nash (00:34:40.532): I am I actually just confirmed it's it'll be the 10th year this year wow it's it's amazing it's been that long but yeah it's it's a dream thing for me because well I love to teach I obviously care about the topic but it also happens to be one of the misses I felt when I was at Stanford was I mean, so many students at Stanford are the first in their family to go to college or if they're not, you know, they, they feel like they, they got the golden ticket they just don't want to mess it up and the truth is when I went to school there weren't classes I actually think it should be I've actually open sourced all the material it's actually available a free blog I've actually had a number of schools at all different levels even internationally ask if they can use the material and it's great for me that's the reward I'll walk through.
Brian Bell (00:35:23.967): With my teenage boys I think that's a good idea.
Adam Nash (00:35:26.307): Yeah, no it's uh I'm a big believer in that uh, you know, with my own children as well I think that for some reason especially in the united states we're incredibly uncomfortable talking about money and about how it affects people's lives and and how we make decisions, you know, we'll go to the store with our children and, you know, they'll want to buy something and the reality is it's not in the budget but we don't want to say that to our children and we don't want to burden them with thinking too much about money and life etc and so we tend to make up other reasons right like oh that's not that or, you know, that we'll talk about anything else and I happen to be in the school of thought that says that, you know, this is when you do that, you know, children figure it you're not talking about and so a lot of people what they know about money is just what they picked up from it's funny it's the same thing with careers at LinkedIn I used to say that step one for most children is kind of the friends of your parents and the parents of your friends tend to be the adults, you know, and so so your worldview tends to be very narrow because it's it's basically based on that and so I, I really think that's where education comes in to to open, you know, kids minds and and and to help people navigate their lives so by college I mean, students really need it they I'm not talking Adam Nash (00:36:34): about fancy stuff I'm not talking about portfolio theory or, you know, calculating returns I'm talking about the basics of what financial products are what problems they solve and, you know, how do you lead a healthy financial life like I, I think that these are things that actually everyone needs to learn from someone at some point.
Brian Bell (00:36:49.803): I mean, I, I grew up poor and uh on welfare and that's why I got a finance degree frankly I mean, I was getting a history major up in up in washington state where I'm from and that got really boring and I was like I better learn how to like money work so I went and got a finance degree it was interesting I'm decent at math I like the, you know, the numbers of it and stuff and ended up working wall street hating that and now I'm a vce which is very random but kind of full circle but, you know, like that's why I got a degree in finance I just wanted to understand how it all works, you know, from the inside.
Adam Nash (00:37:18.827): Yeah, I think a lot of U.S. Who love the field get into it that way right we had like I said I had my own stories etc but on this desire of how does this work how do you make good decisions I want to understand this and for some people I want to be good at it I think a I mean, it turns out that in our economy and in our society, you know, like I said money is not necessarily the goal that most people have but wow does it turn out that if you don't understand how it works the basics right it can really get in the way of some of the goals that we have that are are the most important to U.S.
Brian Bell (00:37:52.107): Yeah, speaking of money you've angel invested in 90 plus companies some really amazing ones like Figma Gusto Opendoor fibres and many others so you're like a prolific angel this is very much a startup in VC podcast and I love to learn from really great angels like you so what's what is a pattern that you look for when you when you make an investment.
Adam Nash (00:38:10.177): Well, I appreciate although I almost I, I think at this point I've been angel investing almost 14 or 15 years I think I'm up to about 160 170 companies because I have a model, you know, one of the things I learned so so my angel investing is kind of an interesting combination of of of course being an operator and knowing something about what I know and what I don't know.
Brian Bell (00:38:30.625): Yeah, and having a little humility around that and create great organizations.
Adam Nash (00:38:34.871): And yeah yeah but then also having spent a couple tours of duty at at some great venture firms understanding how professional venture capitalists really think of it what it takes to run a fund in a firm like Graylock really helps use a system so as an angel investor I'm probably not as as sexy or cool as as, you know, folks who kind of have the inspiration etc I, I actually run it a little bit like venture I even break my angel every three years into what I call a fund that I track but, you know, I actually not surprisingly I treat it as a little bit of a personal finance I've tacked I there's a certain amount of money I feel like I can afford in my broader portfolio to invest right.
Brian Bell (00:39:10.400): In new startups every year just out of curiosity for LPs listening when they're thinking about investing in and venture funds and angel investments and spvs like just, you know, what what is that percentage of your wealth that you feel comfortable every year putting towards.
Adam Nash (00:39:23.502): That asset they're they're not going to love this answer but I'm happy to give it but they're not going to love it there's some people who do their angel out of income basically I, I never approach it that way I think that's valid but I, I don't approach it that way I always treat it a little bit more as a portfolio problem so I basically said that I can afford to have about 10 percent or so of of my savings of my, you know, assets invested in startups yeah and so this is the part they're not going to like we all know it takes about 10 years I do seed stage it takes about 10 years yeah for the best companies to get from there to any form of liquidity and this is why I see a lot of angels getting wrong I've actually written about this that you see a lot of angels so excited they jump into it they invest year one in a bunch of companies year two and then they realize year three that like wow that's a lot of money out there and none of it's coming back right yeah am I really going to keep doing this down by the way too right what, you know, I'm a gardener too so this expression actually bothers me because it's not true but the VCs always say the lemons ripen early type of thing and so you you tend to see some the failures a little bit more the the ones that don't make it a little faster than the ones that make it.
Brian Bell (00:40:32.119): Right, and maybe not an AI four or five years to raise their a right from a seed right that's right they look like failures like Figma Figma very famously was, you know, I think four years five years between their seed and a something like.
Adam Nash (00:40:43.721): That it was I think it was the a to the b but you're right it's I mean, but that's a great example so Figma I did the seat I walked around palo alto with with Dylan in 2013 and, you know, pinged him afterward and, you know, and he let me put a small check into it and but when did Figma go public right 2025 yeah 12 years later right and so so what I did was I figured out what percent of my portfolio I could afford to have in angel investments I divided that by 10 and then I decided what my check size roughly was with the idea that I had to be able to invest in about four I'm not perfect as, you know, turns out I'm human and emotions run hot and so when I look at my angel now over 14 or 15 years I see like yeah in the years where things are running a little hot maybe I did more like 10 to 12 investments I think there was one year where I may have gotten closer to 20, you know, in the years where I'm super busy as an operator did fewer it's actually funny some of my best investments were in those years that I did fewer there was one year I think I only did six five or six investments but one of them I think it was 2013 I think I think I think that's where Figma and Gusto and Opendoor all were living either 2013 or 2014 that's really good vintage.
Brian Bell (00:41:50.645): As they say in the industry.
Adam Nash (00:41:51.955): Yeah, so but, you know, and you have to learn and so what do I look for um I look for a few things um believe it or not I'm actually a big believer in in so one is when I talk to folks I try to stick to my knitting right there are areas where I have expertise where I know things I'm still a big believer that I need to understand why the founder's talking to me if the reason is just money that's not a great answer, you know, there are people with more money than me but that sort of thing I hate to say but it's a little bit like, you know, if you don't know who the sucker at the poker table is you're the you're the sucker so I, I like when people come to their firm where they want a product executive, you know, someone with real experience maybe it's in social maybe it's in fintech or marketplaces or one of the areas I have direct experience so you can have a lot more value on the money it has to make sense to me why they're talking to me I listened to the founder one of the hard lessons I learned early on the venture side was it's not your company that one of the big mistakes operators make as investors is they keep thinking about what they you would do if they were running the company it's not your company you're not going to be there to run it as a small investor like an angel you're not even on the board you don't even know what they're gonna be doing so you need to actually take yourself out of it enough to just hear what they think they're doing and then and for me I need to hear not just the product value that it adds but also the distribution strategy how are they going to reach people how are they going to get to venture scale and then lastly and this sounds funny but there's a little bit of founder market fit for me which some people like that term some people don't but for me they're the founders who who think they found a great way to make money and I do not begrudge them because that, that is definitely one of the ways to build a business you find a hole in the market you think it does this I happen to be of the point of view that building startups especially venture-backed technology startups a decade at least the best best founders are involved even longer they have to really almost irrationally care about the space yeah it's like.
Brian Bell (00:43:44.320): A founder market live fit.
Adam Nash (00:43:45.723): Yeah, so it doesn't work for me if if it I've met by the way I've passed on on on companies that, you know, turned out to be amazingly valuable because I wasn't sure the dedication of the founder what is your anti I want.
Brian Bell (00:43:58.180): To hear Adam Nash's anti-portfolio what's that check that you didn't write that still keeps you up at night.
Adam Nash (00:44:02.405): Sorry, well none of them keep me up at night I learned that very early there's always gonna be more out there the companies you didn't see the the folks that you missed I mean, I have just from a personal operating standpoint like forget investing I mean, like, you know, everyone who came up in the 90s has this list of like when they could have gone to I could have been like the fifth engineer at Yahoo or, you know, early at Google I mean, I had so many friends who went all these companies you have to tune all that noise out but fundamentally I think that the the venture is filled with so many paradoxes I, I wrote this one post years ago and it reflected on something I'd learned at business school for a totally different reason had to do with business and government but I saw the same pattern in venture which is that the one of the fundamental paradox in venture is that in venture when you're new it's so easy to sound smart by saying no right in fact venture firms push this on associates junior folks in the firm right they come in your bar's not high enough right there's a litany of reasons why this won't work and by the way they're right there's always a litany.
Brian Bell (00:45:01.371): Of reasons why it won't work you could always always say no it's easy to say like it's easy to find a reason to say no.
Adam Nash (00:45:06.813): Yeah, but it's rewarded you sound smart by saying no in the short term but in the long term people only care about when you said yes right and just living in that paradox, you know, and so but the the joy like I could have said no to tons.
Brian Bell (00:45:24.184): Of companies doesn't matter but the fact that I said yes to Google in 1997 at a five cap and put a little 25k check in makes me a legendary Ron Conway level investor for all time so nobody cares that Ron Conway wrote 300 other checks in that fund that's right I mean, that's.
Adam Nash (00:45:41.988): That power law right like etc but so what happens is I think you have to always be looking back at your own foibles and mistakes idiosyncrasies I'm very people driven so in general I tend to invest in people who've worked with me for me that impressed me I think that's one of the ways it also answers the question why are they coming to you right they know you they trust you I mean, the reason Dylan Field came to talk to me was not because I was an angel actually at the time I had barely done a half dozen investments it's because I was the VP of product when he was an intern at LinkedIn right he was he had he wanted some advice so I walked around and then of course what I had learned on the venture side is no if you want to invest, you know, actually say so right and and by the way the original idea that Dylan had I had some real problems with I was not convinced it was going to work it was like a photo editing thing in the cloud it was not right but what I realize now and that I look for more because of Dylan is that some of my best investments came because I like to think of myself as a smart person a connected person I know what's going on to some level I mean, not perfect but you're more than most better than than quite a few so I'm always impressed when I meet someone young who has been diving into space where I thought something and they convinced me that I was wrong right and all of a sudden I go so I remember walking around in in palo the Dylan and he talked about I had this thesis that said hey what was going on with social and mobile was that we'd finally got enough distance from the PC era like 30 years that we were just going to do it again we were going to reinvent everything that we had done in the PC era except for social and mobile and so if you look back at the PC era we started with productivity word processing spreadsheets were the first things that came out that were actually real utility then we went to graphic design art desktop publishing, you know, graphics etc and then later then we went to fintech the quickens of the world etc like so I in my head I was looking for these investments and of course with Wealthfront I was jumping in myself to the third phase because ahead of the curve but, you know, I was talking to Dylan I was like oh I love this because I think it's happened but I told him I said I think it's going to take a while because of all the things that are going to move through the cloud graphics feels like a very late thing this is an area where people will still spend ten thousand dollars on a machine.
Brian Bell (00:47:45.073): That has beefy graphics cars right in a way because it did take them almost the rest of the decade yeah it really.
Adam Nash (00:47:51.838): Yeah, I was yeah I was convinced like, you know, I was like people don't even great designers at the time like wouldn't even use laptops they needed a beefy machine to kind of do it and he said no I think that's complete opposite those GPUs are sitting idle most of the day in the cloud you can have a cluster can be used and by the way I can put enough hardware in the cloud that you would never pay for that yourself you will just rent it and bandwidth has gotten high and latency low enough that I'll just send the pixels for the screen over to you and he was very big on WebGL he's like now's the time like we can build this and we can time frames totally fair but I remember thinking I was just talking and going like you're totally right I, I had already moved by the way at LinkedIn I was using desktop PCs just remote, you know, windows sharing in desktop sharing in because that way I could have the PC at work and free trial laptop I was like yeah it totally works the market's gonna get there and I know that sounds trivial and it wasn't the heart of the right thesis but that pattern with founders I think that if you have the right mentality meeting great founders when they tell you something when you learn something and you feel like you're plugged in for me at least I was like wow this is well it's either wrong can be or it's ahead of the market and so I love it turns out that my some of my most successful investments have been along that line I mean, Gusto was very much it was zen payroll at the time but was very much this this idea that actually the user experience mattered Josh Tomer Eric they were all very passionate about this idea that actually payroll mattered that actually there's this experience like people care about how that like small businesses huge number in the u.s no one was taking care of them and that it was possible now online to acquire to actually find those small businesses and give them a solution that was not just 10X but 100X better than what they had access to so I don't know like if you had asked me before I met them I would have said there is no reason that, that should work a small business products that tortured area venture capital that there are so many tenured venture capitalists who refuse to invest in anything tied to small business just because of how hard the go-to-market was but they were the ones who said no actually I think with online social acquisition I think it's changed I think you can find small business owners the same way you find consumers and frankly having built out LinkedIn I was like no you're right like actually LinkedIn is pretty good for finding small business owners etc it's it's becoming.
Brian Bell (00:50:26.286): A solved problem well Adam I feel like I could talk to you for another hour or two about all this stuff but I know you got to run.
Adam Nash (00:50:31.028): Where can folks find you online? I lack some we already talked about Daffy so when it comes to naming it turns out my handle is Adam Nash on pretty much all the platforms but um you can find me on X Adam Nash you can find me on LinkedIn is Adam Nash um and of course at Daffy on the blog there, you know, I try to write regularly about giving and financial I would highly encourage everyone to check out Daffy.org I don't think Daffy is for people who don't give to charity like if you don't give to charity I don't think we're going to convert you into the type of person who does but if you if you support your kid's school if you belong to a religious institution if you give regularly to national or or global causes try the product it's free to get started put a little money in there I think what you're going to find is that having a separate account for charity I think it's more like an HSA, you know, it's funny uh it is it is like an HSA it's just forgiving yeah yeah it's it all comes down the same thing having a separate account means that when someone asks you to give you no longer have to reach in your pocket and debate you can just literally open your phone tap tap tap yeah and.
Brian Bell (00:51:29.636): If you're inspired to give card right to my Apple Pay, you know, Google Wallet or whatever and just and just pay for it with with.
Adam Nash (00:51:35.960): The funds I have set aside funny you mentioned that we haven't solved that problem.
Brian Bell (00:51:39.382): Yet but it's on the list okay that's on the road map yeah okay well I expect it 99 on time, you know, as somebody who who lived that at eBay.
Adam Nash (00:51:48.208): So, we're we're free now we, we uh we love iterating some of our best feature ideas are things where we didn't plan them one member comment comes in one in inspiration saying why can't we do this for giving and then a week.
Brian Bell (00:52:00.884): Or two later we get it out the door just get yeah just go for it yeah I mean, I, I use the HSA we, we max it out every year and then every once in a while we'll be like oh there's like five grand sitting there let's withdraw it and send all the receipts in and, you know, and every once in a while we'll pull out the card for at the dentist or the doctor's office so yeah I think.
Adam Nash (00:52:16.898): That would make sense yeah it's our members actually are delighted by it there's something that feels really good when you get asked to give and you actually care and you want to support you want to support your friend yeah colleague the organization etc when you open up that app and you discover actually you do have the money yeah and it's literally for nothing else you cannot use it for anything but giving to charity it feels so good to be able to do it when you want to do it it's hard to express that freedom that's why I encourage everyone just.
Brian Bell (00:52:42.570): To try it what we see this miles could I like donate miles into an account like that have you looked into that it's funny we've gotten.
Adam Nash (00:52:49.312): That request just recently yeah a little bit of like are there other ways that I can fund this account.
Brian Bell (00:52:55.592): Right, there's some monetary value there if I have a hundred thousand miles in Southwest or something maybe I could donate that uh we have a startup that helps it's a platform for that so I'll we'll talk after the after the recording interesting all right awesome thanks so much Adam cool thank you again.
