Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast From the Ground Up where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal and here with us today we have Kevin Fu, the co-founder and CEO of Repool, a fintech startup that's backed by Y Combinator and others. It's a fascinating story. Hope you enjoy. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Fu: Thanks Jake. Good to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit about Repool. It's a YC and venture-backed fintech company. It's building modern hedge fund software and infrastructure for emerging managers. Prior to Repool, Kevin was head of revenue at Vitally and founding sales hire at Troops, both successful venture-backed software companies. Outside of building startups, you can find Kevin bouldering, reading science fiction, and getting mad about USC football. So Kevin, are you talking about this year's football or last year's football, or when do you get mad about USC football?
Kevin Fu: My whole career of supporting USC football uh is, is just one big decade of being mad, so no particular time frame. And I hope it stops soon.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Very cool. Well, I'm a fanatic about football in general, so I love their quarterback, I think they're uh, they're, they're looking good. Um before we dive in here a little bit uh Kevin, let's talk about you and you got into the ecosystem of startups. But what was your first role in work? If you go back to even prior to really getting into you know your career, talk about the sales side of your experience.
Kevin Fu: Yeah, I mean you know, I was a kid who grew up in a blue-collar city, and so I have worked fast food jobs. I don't know literally, I was selling fast food, but I think perhaps in a more professional context I actually had an accidental foray into sales in college. I had an internship over a summer where I did door-to-door sales of windows, like physical windows for residential homes, which is a really interesting industry. At the time I thought I was going to go to law school, so I kind of figured what I did didn't really matter, it was almost like an amusing thing to do for the summer. And that was actually really interesting because I will maintain strenuously that that was by far the hardest sales job I've ever had. And I was pretty sure after that summer that I was never going to have to do anything sales related again, which was exciting after what was a somewhat traumatizing experience.
In short, talking to say, Jake the professional podcaster at work is very different than ringing on Jake that I just got home and I'm trying to get dinner with my kids for the first time at 7 PM. The parent uh that Jake might be mad and say all sorts of crazy things at the doorstep that he won't say to me uh on a professional setting or cold call. So pretty savage job. And then indeed, I, I did end up doing some tech internships and deciding that I was interested in the tech industry and not being technical, I actually ended up going into sales generally.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And so those jobs that were in, in sales for technology companies um, what was it that you learned from those roles? And you sound like you landed in some good companies that not, were not only were venture-backed, but some got acquired, some went on to do some really good things and you were leading the charge in some of those companies. So are you natural salesperson? How did you really rise to the top within those companies as they were growing?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, I mean I think part of it is accidental in that I did do a lot of debate and public speaking in high school and college. And I do think that translates well to having some of the soft skills on sales that are hard to teach, or at least take a very long time to adjust. And I do think that's a bit of a natural advantage I have. But ultimately I think most of sales is a learned behavior. And I think the biggest thing that allowed me to accelerate my career relatively quickly, at least compared to some others, is always being intentional and having a view on what I was doing and who I was becoming. Because there are many different forms of being a salesperson, and there are all sorts of different types of sellers. Things that people are good at, things that people are bad at. And I think a lot of people don't actively think about what those things are or where their strengths and weaknesses are in a particularly active sense, beyond when they have to answer those questions in an interview. But I think essentially if you leverage and double down, really figure out your ID, then you'll progress faster because you're kind of putting all your skill points into certain buckets and you can have I think interesting outcomes. And so for me it was, it was really just that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And when you went to these companies that were startups and they got acquired, did you stay on with those companies once they got acquired or did you move to the next company fairly quickly?
Kevin Fu: So the companies I was at that were acquired I, I did move on before they were acquired. So I was not there for that process in particular.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Let's move on to Repool. Um, it's an idea I love, what you're creating. Um and we'll dive more into specifically of the problem you're solving, but when you left Vitally (I'm assuming it was that company prior to your startup) and when you transitioned into your own startup, was there a point where you said, "Look, I'm willing to not get paid for the next x amount of months or years whatever it could be, raise capital," or was there a transition pretty smooth? You already have something in the works before you left? Walk us through that because I think that transition point is really tough for a lot of people to take the risk and know when it's right to do it.
Kevin Fu: Yeah so uh, it's Vitally, but actually many people mispronounce it so that's not on you. But when I, when I left Vitally, it was very abrupt and it was a big leap of faith and I didn't have a particular nest egg. And I don't really come from a background... I think some people like to meme about how founders often come from a position of privilege, I think for me that was not the case. I live in New York, and before that I lived in DC and San Francisco. I didn't have a ton in savings, I've only worked at startups which are not famous for paying out the wazoo unless you're very lucky. And so I left without necessarily much of a you know comfort or, or padding between my, my situation and going in. And I, I didn't take much of a salary, I mean there was the least money I've made since my first year of working for the first year at Repool.
I think it's just a personal decision. I think I was very sure that I wanted at some point in my life to take a crack at starting an opera-, a business. I was passionate and interested in the idea we were chasing. And I was confident and excited about my co-founder. And so for me, I thought that the kind of confluence of factors made essentially the risk worth the squeeze. Um, and so the, the short version of the story is no, I, I just kind of jumped into the abyss. And I fortunately did have a bunch of experience at early stage startups, which I think gave me that kind of professional comfort, and actually understanding what it looks like to be early. Which I do think for a lot of folks who have never been first 10 employees, first 20 employees, is this you know fog of war gray area where they don't really understand what things look like being that early. So at the least I did have that, and that was a large factor in my comfort in making the decision as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I want to go back to what you mentioned about your co-founder. How did you meet and what was it that you saw in him that you felt like "we could build something good together?"
Kevin Fu: Yeah, so you know there's two answers to that. One is the same thing everyone, investors, VCs etc. are looking for, which is: is this person good? Do they have the right bonafides on paper? Do they have the right credentials? Um you know Justin, really talented engineer, went to Duke. Was at uh two YC companies prior to us starting Repool. Most notably he was an early engineer at Brex, which if you're familiar is kind of like a blue-chip venture-backed startup. And was there for basically the majority of the growth part of their journey. And so you know, as a non-technical founder, which is slightly more rare, that gave me the confidence in the hard skills.
The other part is just the soft skills. So to your question, Justin and I have been friends for some time. Um and that's fortune right, I think you have to meet people and know people and hopefully some of them are engineers, and then hopefully some of them are engineers you are interested in working with. But basically we had met through college friends, um you know he lived in New York and we... as we spent more time together as friends, we just kind of realized we saw a lot of the world the same way with regards to our professional interests. Our riff is how we got along, and we just had a lot of comfort that the things that are challenging about being founders, um (because co-founder falling out is actually the number one reason seed stage startups fail), um you know we were very confident that those would not be the death knell for Repool. And so that's one of many reasons you would fail off the list um.
So, so that was it really. And, and I'm fortunate because I don't actually have a ton of friends who are software engineers, but you know Justin happened to be one of them. And I think we had the right type of relationship and, and really that similar worldview that mattered a lot for deciding to go into business together.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Incredible. Talk to us about Repool. Um what problem did you see in the market that you felt you could deliver a platform that would help solve that problem?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, so I think Repool is a really interesting kind of quintessential example of outsiders in Silicon Valley taking on a very challenging looking problem that you might not expect outsiders to take on. And so far we've had some capable degree of success, more than at least the average amount of success, which is exciting. So Repool in short is a hedge fund infrastructure. As you stated, obviously a very specialized and regulated space. In particular, what we do is we help people both launch and operate hedge funds across a wide variety of the back office. We're kind of like the plumbing and you know unsexy pieces of the necessary parts of the business that are related to trading. Of which there are many: compliance, accounting, you know onboarding investors, AML and KYC, etc.
How we actually got here though was a slow journey. We didn't just step out of our jobs in tech and go "Hey, we're not hedge fund people and we're not institutional finance people. Let's just do hedge funds." It was like a lot of I think successful startups: the process of time and pressure and having two hopefully somewhat smart motivated people looking at a space and figuring out where they thought they could add value and where there was opportunity. So the original problem, excuse me, that we were interested in solving was driving more efficient retail behavior. So in 2020 and 21, I think it goes without speaking that there was kind of a paradigm shift in retail investing and investing trends generally that I think has persisted at least philosophically to this day even if activity has drawn down. And we just had the simple thesis that a lot of that behavior when you actually think about it is really just bad money management, right. It's a lot of like: bad trader looks towards hopefully good trader for ideas, and then like copies the idea. But there's no position sizing, there's no strategy, there's no understanding, there's no hedging. I mean it's, it's actually really like a terrible way to invest. If be like if I told you, "Hey, someone at Citadel just bought Apple" and you're like "I guess I'll buy some amount of Apple," and that was like your decision locus. Um and obviously that's like the most low-level version of it, but even for more sophisticated traders, a lot of the behavior was just kind of like trying to source ideas and copy better people or learn from better people.
And so when you think about that, what would be the more efficient behavior? It would be, "well, let the better people manage the money directly and do a better job and reap the rewards of it. And then for the investor you would hopefully see better returns." Long story short, that is a cool idea, but it's super illegal. It's just got to be hedge funds. There is really no way to pool money together and that's why it doesn't exist, and there's not really copy trading and, and anything like that. That's why you just have these like apps that make trading easier, community-driven, but are not actually money management. And so that's how we landed on hedge funds.
And then instead of being scared and running away from hedge funds, which is I think what happens to a lot of people (this is a common problem space), we just sat there for a long time and talked to fund managers and talked to lawyers. And the short version is we kind of drew an interesting understanding that even if you come from the industry, the back office (i.e. that plumbing and operational stuff you have to do) and the launch is kind of just this black box and it's very scary, expensive and hard. So to put that clearly, if you're an eight-year portfolio manager leaving a desk at a multi-stat like Citadel or Millennium, you actually just know nothing about how to launch a hedge fund, by design. Why would you, right? It'd be like if I asked a software engineer what they know about setting up a payroll system for a new business, probably nothing. But this is a much harder version of that problem. Um and so the fact that we are not from the space was not as big of a barrier as you might think.
And a lot of the problems we solve I think are pretty relatable because we don't actually touch the trading. We touch problems like "okay, if you didn't know how to do something and you need to do it for the first time, what would you like that experience to look like?" Or "you need to share things with people and bring people through complicated processes that are on paper and done via email, how can you make a more elegant version of that via email?" And so there's a lot of, of first principles thinking that can happen rather than "hey you need to have 20, 30 years of expertise." There is some of that, but you know we just basically in short would sum it up as: a lot of what we're doing is reduced down to numbers and rules, and those are things that software in principle is good for. And that's really aligned to our background as technologists and Silicon Valley operators. So we kind of made the leap. But definitely I think it was not a direct journey, and it took some time to arrive at where we ended up arriving.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, as a fund manager, if you were to go out and start your own company, this is the type of platform, a product that you can help them launch, get into market, and not worry about the administration, the back office, all the stuff that quite frankly you probably don't want to know. Is that kind of in a box the idea?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, that's part of it. And, and you know, just to be clear and refine on the earlier statement, you know we really moved away from the retail-centric thesis and just kind of realized this problem extended even across the institutional side. So in general, I'd sum it up more as: yeah, it's just painful no matter who you are and how smart you are to administer and do the not trading, not fundraising parts of the hedge fund. And whether that's launch or not, our goal is to make you know every single piece of that as easy as possible.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: How big is a hedge fund market?
Kevin Fu: So the hedge fund market is really big, and probably bigger than people think across most dimensions. The first answer is, I mean look, the reality is is, for better or for worse, most money just flows into private funds at the end of the day. Because rich institutions and people have the disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and they invest it. So private funds represent a 20-30 trillion dollar industry globally. Five trillion of that is pure hedge fund class assets. And by that I mean not private equity, not venture, not real estate, not crypto. Um you know, this is kind of like the more classic on-exchange assets, securities, options, maybe futures, forex, etc. And 65% of that is in the US, right. So three and a half trillion. And it's [an] industry growing something like 5% year-over-year, and there's something like 1,000 to 2,000 fund launches per year. So it is literally reductively just "this is where all the money kind of ends up."
Now obviously that doesn't mean like you know we have a 10 trillion dollar market to go after, because we're kind of a slice of it. That's just kind of the fact that the people touch that amount of money. But it's big, and it has underneath it a very large industry. There are technology providers and service providers that have been around as startups or for a very long time across basically every slice of running a fund: trading, you know analytics, LP relations, the back office, launch law firms, compliance. Each of which has a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of market value amongst the companies that exist both privately and publicly alone. So you know, across all of those there's just this very wide market. It's, it's actually not a question of "is there a market?" which I think is a really common question for startups. We're more trying to like disrupt incumbents, and so the question is more like "where do you pick your spots, can you actually build a sufficiently better enough product that you can disrupt these players that are very good at what they do, that have been around for a very long time, that have a ton of really, really smart people." But the question for us is not you know "is there a market." It's, it's a huge space.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's your ideal target in terms of, of a customer?
Kevin Fu: So the answer depends on what product line you're looking at and also I guess the phase of Repool's business. I would say right now, who we tend to focus on would be small and midsize managers. And that definition translates to basically managers who are launching with less than $100 million of capital. That's not because we can't support larger managers, it's just that managers launching with more capital than that probably have a slightly different set of needs than what we are best at. Um and then we also in general have different products. Some of which like our standalone fund administration platform is more agnostic as to the size of the client. And you know, it doesn't mean that they need to be launching a fund, it could be an existing fund where you're evaluating Repool as a rip and replace to you know, have an easier experience and have a better experience for your investors.
I think over time our goal is basically to just kind of generically be some part of the operating system of all US hedge funds under a certain size. I don't know if it's like a quarter billion or half a billion or even a billion. But I think the journey of Repool is really just focused on like all the hedge funds except the absolute largest ones that are in the headlines like these firms like Citadel, Millennium, etc. Because those firms kind of do things in-house and are at such a scale that they don't really look towards external vendors and have very bespoke needs. But even you know 500 or billion dollar shops are often just four or five people um that are, that are running the whole operation. And they have a lot of the same pains as even a 50 or 100 million manager that might be 10 times or even 20 times smaller than them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: As you look at your company and today's market, it's very different than 24 months ago or even prior to COVID. Companies are building their teams locally, internationally, remotely, hybrid, on-site. What's your position on remote versus on-site and local versus international?
Kevin Fu: I think it's on-site and local, without a doubt. And I think anyone saying otherwise is just plainly wrong or they're speaking from the interest of an employee. I don't think there's a right answer... If I wasn't a founder and I was optimizing for lifestyle, I would prefer to be remote and flexible. But I think any argument that a remote culture is somehow better, as good as in-person is just plainly untrue. In-person implicitly has more collaboration by definition, more brain share, more incidental trading of ideas, and generally I think a higher level of camaraderie, culture and motivation. And to the extent those things are replicable in remote culture, you have to try and invest way more resources to achieve parity level outcomes. So we have been pretty grouchy about building local only. I mean we're not totally crazy, it's not 5 days a week in office, but in general we really do want people to be in our offices in either New York or San Francisco and we want them to come in person and kind of be a part of that. I think it's just generically likely to have a better outcome, especially the earlier stage of the business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you decided to go into Y Combinator, what was the premise behind it and was that the only option you were thinking about?
Kevin Fu: So we actually did have offers at the time, which we're very grateful for, for other initial seed capital and other programs. And I think the short answer here is like, there's no long story. I think any entrepreneur basically knows that YC is the gold standard, and not by a little but by a lot. And so if you are a first-time founder that is an entrepreneur, you know, and you get into YC, you just do it and there's no questions asked. In fact I'll tell you that the day we got into YC, which was a very surprising moment for us because we didn't expect to at all... um we were very early, I mean we applied to YC with just an idea and we basically didn't expect to get an interview. And then they interviewed us and we didn't expect to get in. I mean it's something like a 0.8 or 0.9% acceptance rate. And when they let us in, we had not seriously thought at all about whether that was possible. But both of us quit our jobs the next day. And we both had very good jobs. So you get into YC, you go. That's kind of it. Life gives you lemons and you make the lemonade.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Why do you think you got in?
Kevin Fu: You know I think it varies for every team. For us I do think there's a bit of the background. I think the combination of having a technical founder that comes from kind of a prestige company, for better for worse, is just something that VCs and accelerators look for. So you have someone who went to a great school, that worked at great companies. And Brex is also a YC alum and has produced a lot of other YC founders. And then you pair it with a person that has been at early stage startups as an operator at the various early levels and been successful. And I think it's basically the right type of team for a pre-seed or seed or accelerator where you're betting more on the team than the idea. But there is I think obviously other stuff that they're looking for. I think that's only one factor that's relatively large. I think a lot of it is just clarity of thought and having been thoughtful around the idea and having a very clear view on why something could be a billion dollar business.
And I think that's probably one of the biggest things people struggle with, is they can't actually articulate why what they're doing is going to be a venture scale business. Um and it could be a good business or even a great business, but you really have to be able to do that. And that was something we spent a lot of time on to the extent we did work on the idea, is we knew as founders that we only wanted to leave our jobs to chase something that we truly believed had venture scale possibility, i.e. you know billion dollar plus you know outcome.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Thanks for sharing that. As a company out there potentially looking to get into an accelerator, what are a couple things that you didn't think you would get out of YC that you left knowing that it's really helped you personally, or maybe as a company that's been uh something you could share?
Kevin Fu: I think it's like going to college and getting a lot of views and experiences, rather than like the hard skills you learn. It's like the context that hopefully, if you have a good decision-making framework, informs that. You know, every company is different, so it's not that like even the lessons you get either directly from YC or from looking at other companies are I think that useful in a literal sense. But you kind of learn things like... you know, you go to school and you learn how cultural the world is and how diverse backgrounds are. Similarly, you see a lot of really smart people attacking a lot of different problems. Some of which are similar in a lot of different ways, some of which you might look at and go like "I wouldn't have done it that way, that seems stupid to me." And then they probably do better than you, and you're like "okay, like put that one in the quiver of the mental model for you know being open-minded, thinking about both tactically implementing their specific approach, but also just like the operating philosophy that a lot of these people have."
I think it's, it's that. It's more of like a philosophical mindset. It's trying hard, it's the values of YC about moving fast. I think that those things are said, it's kind of like the you know "you don't know until you know." Like I can tell you that you'll learn this thing, but until you do this thing, like a bad analogy is I can tell you what it's like to like you know, do drugs, but you know you probably won't really get it until you do the drug, right? Like you know alcohol or weed or insert drug of your choice. Um you, you really, there's a big difference between practice and, and conceptual. I think the other is I do think some people are very helpful. And perhaps as an answer related question, a lot of stuff is not helpful. A lot of things you hope will be helpful and romantic and sexy are just like super not. And I think that's part of the unfortunate reality of most things, is most things that you think are exciting are just like point-in-time and small and trivial and not as exciting. Um but I do think you hopefully, in the course of meeting a ton of founders, and then being assigned YC partners who themselves are you know really talented operators usually, who have seen you know literally hundreds of startups, many of whom successful, at least a few of those people I think are going to surprise to the upside and how insightful and helpful they will be. And I think that is invaluable. But it's not one thing right, it's like I still have relationships I talk to and strategize with as problems arise. It's not like they said some magic phrase of 10 sentences or some 30 minute Zoom call and I walked away a changed man. It's really just that you know, they're there and they're part of my network community. They help me kind of forge a better path on an ongoing basis.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really good, thanks for sharing that. Yesterday we had in our podcast Adam Nash, who was the product manager and lead at LinkedIn, helped take them public and invested in 100 companies, went on to do some really good stuff, is you know Stanford grad and Harvard MBA. And uh you know, he said that there's some strategies every startup should think about around you know, "What's your people strategy? What your financial strategy? What your marketing or product strategy? And what's your operational strategy?" And he's a board member on a number of companies today. When you look at your company and you think about the pillars that are important for you around strategy, talk about people. What's your people strategy today in terms of the, how you look at the hires that you bring on board and the DNA of the people that make up your company? What's important to you as you build out your company?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, I mean I, I guess I'd first respond by being slightly cynical and saying like, that sounds like a lot of the concern and perspective of someone solving larger scale problems than what like frankly a startup has to think about. I'm kind of dubious of people who have like profound strategy insights at the zero to one phase. It's just a very tactical time. And broad ideas about like the culture you want to be and who you want to be when you grow up and how you think about values are frankly so secondary. Like you have to solve them eventually, or you're going to have problems down the line, and you should lay foundation for a lot of those things and think about them, but they're not really that important I don't think in the, in the you know, that's not where you should be allocating your time.
That said, I guess in a tactical sense, how we think about people is not that we have like some overarching thesis that like you know "this is like some specific pillar of values we deliberately arching towards." Because I think you just like constrain yourself. Like you're, you're actually saying that you have a preconceived view on what's best before you've actually gone through the experiential part of seeing if that's true. You've just kind of closed a ton of doors and said "this one's the best and so people better fit in it." And I think that's just principally incorrect. Um at a certain point you need to have a set of doors otherwise you can't scale, but anyways. For us, I think with people it's, it's really just two or three really key things.
One is that they have to really want to be at a startup and understand what that means. I think especially in today's market, there are a lot of people who want to have their cake and eat it too. And I again caveat everything I say with, I don't actually have a view on it being best or worst, it's just: if you're going to do a startup you better lean in. Some people want to come and do the startup things and have the equity, but they also want to like work a 9 to 5. And you got to pick. You know that's just not how things go. So I think a lot of people apply and they say they want to join a startup, they say things they want more ownership, but do they really mean it or does it just sound sexy? And I think a lot of times frankly, even for very smart people, it is not that they truly mean it across the board, and you have to really uncover those things. And I don't think anyone is going to be a slam dunk across the board, but you just want to really make sure that they're motivationally aligned and they're going to get something out of a startup.
The other thing on that note is most people should look at startups as a lottery ticket. And I think that went a little bit far in the wrong direction during the last few years when things were really crazy, but people should want to join a startup being able to answer the question: "Assuming this company fails (like I guarantee that the company will fail in the next two to three years), are there a set of circumstances where I'll still be really happy to have joined despite making less money, but being at a company no one will ever care about ever again and having essentially done something that went into the ground?" A lot of people don't have an answer for that. It's like predicated on [a] more romantic vision. So that's a long way of saying you know, the first one.
The second is I think they just need to be smart and hardworking, and you need to believe that you can actually give them trust. And I think this is again to what I said earlier about something that is conceptually easy but hard. There's a lot of memes about founders being bad at giving away you know, trust in handing things off. And VCs have different terms, like I think First Round Capital's is something like "learning to give away your Legos" or something. But memes aside, I, I actually [am] really sympathetic to why that's hard. Is, as a founder this is something that just matters so much more to you than any other job has mattered to you for a wide variety of reasons. And you are just thinking about things at a level where you're wondering, "Does this employee also think about things the way I would? Even if they're a better domain expertise person in that regard or have better experience, do they really care?" And if you have any doubts, then you struggle to hand things off. So you really need people to be some baseline level of brilliant, and you need to believe that they are actually going to operate almost like, like you would in the space you're hiring for them. Um and I think that's like a lot harder in practice than it is in theory. Um and certainly we haven't been perfect at it. And it's something that we learned was important more than we thought over time. But it's that. I mean the candidate just needs to be awesome and you need to believe that they're awesome. And then hopefully they are awesome! Whatever exactly that means for your company and for you as a founder I think will vary.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. As you look at the product today and as you get into 2024, where do you feel is the area you need to focus on the most in terms of where's the biggest challenge for you as a company today?
Kevin Fu: I think it's the generic problem of, you have... and just for some context, like we're at a, a stage where we have clients, we have a good chunk of revenue. And you have actually like the sense that you're building something valuable, um rather than being in that pre-total product-market fit stage. So for us I think it's a lot about, can you actually deploy your resources to get to the next level? I think it's very obvious what we need to do or what Repool looks like, you know, in idea, we, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months from now. But it's actually not always very obvious if you can, with the constraints you have, get there in a way that is desirable. For example we have growth goals, and if I just deployed all of our capital you know on a crash course to burn out with no money in the next 12 months, I think we could get there. But that's not actually what I can do right?
So I, I have to really think about getting to these ambitious goals while also doing a bunch of other things that kind of compete with getting to the goal, right? I mean it's, it's kind of like the downfall advice, like a lot of advice is contrary. It's like "be really cash flow efficient" is something that you hear, especially right now. But people also say things like, "You know hire multiple people and be prepared to fire some of them. People won't work out." And I'm like "Well, which one is it? Like, do I hire a bunch of people and then like spend a ton of money on salary but also I'm cash efficient? I mean, how can those things be congruous?" Um it, it's the execution of, of all these small things that get you from zero to .5, .5 to 1, 1 to 1.5 that I think are really the death knell for any company, and that's true for us. So it's a complex answer, it's nothing specific about Repool, it's just: do we hire the right people? Do we make the right decisions? Do we change our decision making fast enough? And all those little tiny things that are really, really hard to do and kind of nebulous.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: As you look into 2024, again what, what are you excited about, about the product? Whether it's you know evolving or adding new functions or features, or going into a different market. What uh what do you, what do you look at in the future on the road map?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, so for us we're at a point where we kind of do all the things, right. In other words, you don't get like 50% of a hedge fund. I mean you could, that would be really bad, this is not how this space works though, right? So in a lot of startups you might build like one tiny thing and it might not do anything else and you're selling to other software companies. And it's fine because they'll go like, all these other things they'll go buy somewhere else. But if you told someone like, "I'll do 50% of your accounting," that's like a huge problem! You can't just have 50% of your investors in the wilderness, or yeah I don't know what half your portfolio is doing! Like "you're up 5% here, but the rest, who knows?" right. So we do it all. Um for us, knowing that we have this foundation and knowing that the clients we do have are excited about what we're doing, and the value prop is appealing (because why wouldn't it be? The value prop is essentially "we do the things that you already need but better"), but then the question is like, "How, how much faster can you build those better things?"
So I'm excited about, now that we have the foundation, spending more time on building those better interesting things that we think no one else is doing. Because when you're in a space like ours where you're attacking an incumbent market, you can't just build some cool feature. You have to actually get to parity first. And that's not to say we're there, we have parity for a certain type of customer, but now that we have it, we can, we can actually lean in on our strengths, which is using software and a lean bright team to solve problems in a new way than anyone else has solved them. And, and generally across the board I'm excited about those things. Making the act of subscribing to a hedge fund easier for LPs, helping LPs communicate and fundraise in a more efficient manner, helping them distribute information, helping them have less time that they have to think about compliance, and automating certain filings and procedures. Those are all things that I think no one is doing, and that's stuff that we are hoping to do that is very fun and exciting.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Cool. Well as we wrap up here Kevin, uh first and foremost big shout out to you for jumping on here and sharing your story. Uh going from door-to-door sales as a young kid to leading a uh software company in New York I think is a great journey, and love to connect back with you in the future to see how things progress. If anybody wanted to find Repool where would they go?
Kevin Fu: Yeah, so we're on Twitter and we're obviously at repool.com. I think basically if you are interested in the hedge fund [space], then you should just come talk to us. And you can contact me anytime, kevin@repool.com and I'm happy to chat.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well thanks a lot for joining us today, and to our, all of our listeners for listening, means the world to us. Uh my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal and look forward to catching up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, we can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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