Redefining Banking: Paul Kesserwani's Cushion Story

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, 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 excited to have with us today Paul Kesserwani, founder of Cushion, a California based startup which has raised $21 million in funding. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Kesserwani: Thanks for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well Paul, uh a little bit more about Paul before we dive in here. Paul is the founder and CEO of Cushion, a fintech company reimagining the way consumers manage and pay their bills. Prior to Cushion, Paul spent four years at Twitter helping scale revenue, preparing for the IPO, and as a product manager. And then before that he was an early employee at multiple startup, and successful startups at that. So Paul I guess before we dive in here um, tell us a little bit about you. Uh how did you get into technology, how did you even get into the startup space?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah happy to um. So I actually grew up in Lebanon in the Middle East. Uh that was most of my upbringing and became very clear to me at a young age that that is not a place you want to try to build a thriving career unless you were a politician or a crook. So I got good grades, got out of there as quickly as possible and came to the US. And from a very very early age I knew that I wanted to start a company. I had actually tinkered with some things in college, but when I graduated in '08, the housing market had crashed and even though I wanted to start a company, the market was crap. I had no skills, I had no experience. So I decided let me just move up to Silicon Valley, immerse myself in tech, just start from the ground up and build up that skill set and network. And eventually maybe one day I can start my own thing. And I did get a computer engineering degree, but I did not like writing code. So I just thought, how can I use this as a superpower? So when I moved to Silicon Valley I decided to be like the most technical guy in non-engineering roles like sales, product management, so on.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know it's interesting you talk about you moved to Silicon Valley, and proximity for a lot of people determines what you do in your life. You might be from the Midwest, you live in Detroit and you're in the automotive industry. You know, Tony Robbins, well-known executive strategist, talks a lot about proximity as being an essential strategic aspect of what you end up doing your life. So uh Silicon Valley is a place I was born and raised, I know there's a lot of opportunities there. Um you worked at some startups, so going from having a degree in computer science, science, which makes sense how you could move from that into product or revenue or some area within a startup... um when you started working for startups, what were the things that you gravitated towards? What, what were the interesting things in a smaller entity or a smaller company versus a bigger one such as Twitter?

Paul Kesserwani: It's funny because I think the philosophy is the same, which is add value as fast as humanly possible, and become a product expert as fast as possible. So when you join a company, doesn't matter if it's a startup or Twitter, learn how the product functions in set and out and start solving problems and fixing things as soon as you set foot in the organization. And if you do that you're going to be successful either way. The difference is with Twitter for example, they had a lot of resources. There's quite a few teams. At a small startup there is no, you know, team of people to help you out. There's a problem, you have to figure everything out from scratch. Some people thrive in that environment, other fall, others fall apart. But I absolutely loved the controlled chaos of "no solution, no problem, let's just figure this out and get going."

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know it's, it's funny um I want to go back a little bit to networking and proximity. Uh you know, just this show as, as we're speaking today, you're on our podcast, but we've had other people on the podcast too: Sam Hodges, uh Lewis Barrel, other startup founders you know Vouch and Rocket Place, that I didn't know that you all know each other. Because they invested in your company. And you don't have to necessarily be from Silicon Valley to get funded today, but I think it definitely helps in terms of building the network out with investors. Um have you found that to be true?

Paul Kesserwani: Uh it's, I mean I know the world has changed since I started the company a couple years ago, but for me it was 100% true. Like, like Lewis and Sam both angel investors in Cushion, I did not know them well personally but I went through 500 Startups where Sheel Mohnot was you know the head of that, and Jake Gibson, co-founder of NerdWallet was an EIR there and an investor. Sheel introduced me to Sam, Jake introduced me to Lewis, all of them invested. So the proximity, literally in person, geographically, it does matter quite a bit. Um and in this new remote world it is quite challenging. That's why I do spend a lot of time flying back to San Francisco, flying to New York, because the proximity, as you're saying, does you know...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You bring up a good point, an accelerator. So you went through 500 Startups, a number of guests have been through Y Combinator, Techstars. What did 500 Startups teach you that you've applied to your current company today?

Paul Kesserwani: So I, I was very lucky because when I joined I got to spend a lot of time with Jake and Sheel, who now you know are managing partners of, of Better Tomorrow Ventures. They're just unbelievably helpful in opening doors, showing up. Like I was for the most part a solo founder for the majority of this journey, so it was just nice to have folks like that to lean in on. What I learned from uh 500 Startups was [an] interesting lesson which is: keep your eye on the prize. Because a lot of folks are treating 500 Startups like "yeah we're in, let's have fun," kind of like you're getting an MBA, when the reality is "no, no, we're still building a company and that still needs to be the priority." And I noticed that over the years the folks who were in my class that kept their eyes on the prize did well and have continued to thrive, and many others did not. Um but it's really just like this ecosystem of other founders, other people getting their teeth kicked in alongside you, and just cheering each other on.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I think it's such a valuable thing to do and go through, even if you have a degree or maybe even your MBA, just to be part of that inner circle of founders helping other founders, uh potentially getting connected to a network of funding. And just in general, um it's lonely at the top when you're building companies, so being able to collaborate with others, understand their, their, their trials and tribulations, maybe be able to learn from that as well. Um let's dive into your company because you have a unique story, it may be one of the first that we've talked about where you built a company, you had some success, revenue is coming through the door, um your investors are happy, and then you decide to make a change. And make a change and build another company with actually shutting down the first service you created in the company. I think that's a hard thing to swallow for you, maybe for your employees, maybe for your investors. Yeah, walk us through that.

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah. So the context here is the first product we had built at Cushion was a first-of-its-kind that would negotiate people's bank fees for them. So if Bank of America or Chase were charging you overdraft fees, we built a suite of bots that would negotiate on your behalf and get you a bunch of that money back. This is many years before ChatGPT. During COVID you know people were getting furloughed and let go off their jobs, they needed that money, and our service took off. So we went from zero revenue, zero customers to 3 million ARR and 100,000 paying customers in about 10 months.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.

Paul Kesserwani: This is with like a six-person team just working day and night. Um so the charts look incredible, employees are excited, investors are pumped. But something deep in my gut was telling me this is not sustainable. We are basically pointing a bazooka at the banks. Uh this is going to make us radioactive to a lot of other companies. But also we were not solving the core problem: why are these consumers continuing to get hit with these recurring bank fees? Sure, we'll get you back two, 300 bucks, but if you're continuing to get hit with fees something is unresolved. And I spent some time talking to a bunch of our customers, surveying them, looking at the data, excuse me. And that's when it became clear that the underlying issue, the bigger problem was cash flow management, specifically around how people managed and pay their bills.

Um so I ended up writing a 20-page memo to my team to say "I know that you've worked really hard and I know that we have something that's working, but here's why I believe this is not the right thing for us to you know scale over the next couple of years." And I had to have a similar talk with our investors and tell them "Do you want me to sell this thing for 20, 30 million dollars and call it a day? Or are we going to actually swing for the billion dollar business that's going to actually help people on a regular basis?" And reluctantly they said, "Although we love these charts, they look beautiful, up into the right, we do think you should swing for the higher impact solution." And that's why we switched gears and um decided to focus on bill pay.

The hardest part about that was everyone saying "but wait a second, can't we also have the first thing and do the bill pay product?" And the reality is with so few resources, with a you know at that point 15 person team, you cannot be spread thin across two offerings. If, if that's the future we need to kind of like burn the boats. The negotiation is dead, let's put all of our energy into the new thing. And that's what we did.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So talk about bill pay. There's a lot of companies in the space of bill pay. What is it that you do differently that you bring into market that your investors are excited about?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah so there are a lot of companies that offer bill pay. The funny thing is if you ask 10 people walking down the street "how do you pay your bills?", all 10 of them will have completely different processes set up. There's no go-to right for, for managing and paying your bills. Some people will use like Truebill, Rocket Money to do some bill management. Some people use their bank's bill pay offering because they set it up 10 years ago and it's too tedious to undo. But what everybody doesn't realize, or most people don't realize, is the world of bills completely changed in the last 20 years. So 20 years ago you had a handful of bills: your rent or mortgage, your car, your phone, your internet. That's about it. Then in 2010 subscriptions exploded: Netflix, Hulu, Tinder, you name it. And, and that's where companies like Rocket Money took off because they're like "okay, this is starting to get a little bit complicated."

But what we picked up on was that Buy Now Pay Later was growing violently and that adoption started to scare us. And we're starting to ask ourselves: if you already had like 5 to 10 bills, then another 5 to 10 subscriptions, now another 5 to 10 Buy Now Pay Later loans on top of that, how could you possibly manage these? And that's when we decided we're going to build a first-of-its-kind product to actually aggregate all of your Buy Now Pay Later purchases. So things you've bought through Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, Sezzle, whatever. All into one app, in addition to your subscriptions and you know basic bills, help you pay them through us, and build your credit through all of those payments. And nobody has done that today other than Cushion.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You mentioned "build your credit." How does that interact with your application? Because to me, you know, look I've used products like yours and I love it. It automates my ability to [not have to] think about what has to be paid and when. Uh I don't have late fees and additional issues that come up and potentially ding my credit. But how does your product help my credit?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah. So the way we do it is when you pay, when you sign up for Cushion and decide to pay your bills through us, we issue you a virtual card. And really what we're doing is, is extending a almost invisible line of credit. We're paying the bills on your behalf and we're getting paid back by you very quickly. And in that process, payments that otherwise would not get reported to the credit bureaus we're able to report on your behalf. So that could be your utilities, that can be your subscriptions, but the unique thing is your Buy Now Pay Later. And why is that unique? Because most Buy Now Pay Later payments these [customers are] paying for are not reported to the credit bureaus, which is not really fair to the consumer who's saying, "Well I'm already paying you for this and I'm paying you back on time and you are lending me money, I should earn credit for that. I should be building my credit history." And so we've made that happen for them.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's incredible. So how big is the market? I mean you're, this sounds like it's a category that's already established. Uh what, how big is the opportunity you're really trying to, to create here?

Paul Kesserwani: Well we don't, we don't view you know Buy Now Pay Later as the opportunity. We view it as a very timely uh bandwagon for us to jump on, saying "Listen, you know a couple years ago only a few million users had used Buy Now Pay Later, now the next year or two should be about 100 million Americans have in one way shape or form interacted with Buy Now Pay Later products." So it's gone from being a product to being a payment method that consumers expect to see at checkout. And you know that it's becoming mainstream when banks like Chase and American Express are offering "pay over time". So since this is not going anywhere, since this is becoming a mainstream way of paying, we do have an opportunity to earn consumer trust, become top of wallet with them, and become the go-to way that consumers pay their bills, make their Buy Now Pay Later payments. Um that's how we think about it at least.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I like that "top of wallet". It's like top of funnel for marketing, but top of wallet for consumers. Um how do you know when to pivot? Cuz I think there's not a lot of lessons around pivoting. We've had to pivot ourselves when COVID hit, we, we went remote and now we're international and there was no playbook for us. It was "let's put our heads together, dig deep, figure out a way" and basically with determination make it happen. But there's indicators that come around that start to give you that gut feeling, that gut check that "you know I might want to look around this corner a little bit here," or "we might be out of business," or "there might be some changes that I need to adapt to." Um for you, you talked a little bit about that, but I just want to go back to that a bit more, of what were... I mean did you see ChatGPT coming? Or what were the things that you... I mean the banking maybe having some issues with the banks in the future, maybe I could see that. But was there anything else? And then once you decided to make the pivot, was it just a matter of "let's build a new product?"

Paul Kesserwani: These are all really really good and tough questions. Um first of all, I did not see ChatGPT coming. Uh I, I don't think I'm smart enough to... that would have been pretty impressive. I wish I could take credit for that. Um I think it's a combination of things, but one thing I've learned above all in the like seven, almost seven years I've been doing this is to follow my intuition. So when I start to feel like a burning feeling in my core and I'm not sleeping right and things, I start [to] have nightmares about something, it's usually a sign that I should stop and listen. And I know this is not very helpful to other people, but my body, my insides were saying "there's something wrong here." And even though the charts look great, this is not right.

And it was a couple of reasons. One is when you set up a solution like ours, you're an intermediary between the consumer and the banks. You want a win-win-win situation. You want everybody involved to be winning that transaction. But if we're fighting with the bank and they're losing so that the consumer can win, or the bank wins by saying no and then us and the consumer lose, how do you scale a formula like that? And so that framework, showing that, exposing that to the team, they're like, "That's a really good point. We do want to make sure all parties are winners from this."

And then the second part is a lot of companies build a hook or a wedge, which is arguably what fee negotiation was, see some early success and think like "oh that's working, let's do more of that." It's like "no, no, no, that was the hook to get someone in, that doesn't mean you have something scalable, repeatable with deep engagement." And so I think when you have beautiful numbers it's easy to be blinded by those charts and be like "I want more of that" and then the chickens come home to roost, eventually falls off a cliff because everybody churns. That's, and you don't want to get to that point. So to, to kind of answer your question it was a combination of intuition, seeing the sentiment of the consumers, seeing the sentiment of the banks and saying "where is this all going?" And I love to tell the team "the data tells the story." The data was talking to us when we looked at the information and saw adoption of Klarna and Sezzle and Afterpay exploding, like "there's something here now, let's, let's focus on it."

And the last piece I'll say, which I think the part that I'm most proud of as a, the founder, is when I decide that there's a problem area I want to focus on, I immerse myself completely. What I mean by that is when I started Cushion and we wanted to [do] fee negotiation, I emptied out my bank accounts, gave money to like my parents and all that and said "I want to be broke. If I want to help people who [are] struggling with fees, I need to be getting hit with fees." When we decided to go deep on Buy Now Pay Later, I started to buy everything with Klarna and Afterpay and I immediately got overwhelmed! I'm like... and I asked my team to do the same. We're like, "Alright, if we are you know computer science majors and all that and we're struggling, how is the average Joe supposed to do this?" So it makes it a lot easier to work on the problem when you're feeling the pain in yourself as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, when you make a pivot within a company you may lose investors and you also may lose employees. I think you got to get the culture right with your company and the employees you have when you started, and then you transitioned to your new service today. How many employees did you have, did you lose any and how many are you today, and are you local or global?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah. So when we decided to make the change, we had grown to about 17 or 18 folks, that's like full-time employees. We have a bunch of contractors and whatnot. And a few things happened. One is that first push through COVID was beyond exhausting. We were living at the office, having dinner at midnight you know in downtown San Francisco, it was just crazy. And there are a few folks who got burnt out by that push and they said, "Alright, I gave you the push to get here, but I don't have another iteration of this in me." And so they opted out. But it's actually the, the, the folks who did stay on board, when we raised our Series A last year, I managed out at least a quarter of the company. And I said "Listen, thank you for everything that you've done. You've been great. Your skill set is phenomenal for zero to one, but we need to go from one to N at this phase." So gave them nice severance packages and I brought in new talent. So I think a lot of companies just say "oh you've been with us for a long time so obviously you'll, you have a seat here," that's, that's not good for anybody. And a lot of them agreed. They're like, "You're right, I actually don't know how I would contribute at super, super effectively in this next iteration." So right now we're still at around 18 people. We just had ended up turning over nine folks between some opting out, some being asked to leave. Um and we are kind of all over the country. Uh we do have a headquarters in San Francisco with a few employees there. We have people in I think eight or nine states, and then we have some employees in Spain, some contractors in Czech Republic, Russia, etc.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, one of the challenges for a lot of startup founders is finding the right people, the right par-, partners, and the right process of hiring. What's some insightful I don't know, values that you could share with, with other founders that have worked for you when it comes to understanding what you want and then making sure you, you get the right people on the team?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah. Hiring is so, so challenging. Uh and as you know, it's, somebody could look great on paper and they show up and just can't do anything at all. So in terms of insightfulness, I would say no matter what you do, you're absolutely going to get it wrong a bunch of times. So don't let that so [deter you]... be quick to recognize that you made a mistake and make the change immediately. Don't try to sell yourself that this person's going to become remarkable in a couple of months later, they're not. Um the thing that we've learned is uh I, I make... I don't care how senior you are, how junior you are, we make people do an assessment. I want to see that you're able to do the work. I don't care if you went to Stanford, I don't care if there's a Google logo on your resume. None of that matters. What matters is can you show up and can you get things done. Um and the, the... I, I think I've made a lot of mistakes, I've had to let go of quite a few people, that's just the process. But the one thing that has not failed a single time in the six and a half years was when I bring somebody on board, the top performers contribute immediately. Some, we have developers day one they're pushing up production code. And the folks who don't end up doing well, the first 30 days go by, we've seen nothing. Another 30 days we've seen nothing, and we end up asking them to leave. Um so yeah that's kind of some of, some of the things I've definitely learned over the past couple years.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Do you think within 30 or 60 days you kind of know if it's the right fit, or do you think that term should be extended 90, 120, 180 days till you really know this is the right person, or this just quite frankly it's never going to work?

Paul Kesserwani: I mean I don't want to generalize because we are still a Series A company, we're sub-30 people, so this is probably the wrong answer for a slightly bigger company. But for us, given how much there is to do and there's how many things that are not getting done because of the lack of resources, uh that time period of 30, 60 days is too long. Within a few days you should be able to pick something up, fix it, add some value, exit that first week having accomplished a few things. And we're just... we actually shortened that time frame. I onboarded an engineer and offboarded him nine days later! Like, for the life of me I could not get this guy to function the way we want him to function. And the whole team [was] like, "this is just not a fit." So we [were] like "okay, I'm sorry this is not going to happen."

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah sometimes they say "it's not who you hire, it's who you fire that makes you successful."

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: The faster you move, the faster you make decisions you know, you know what you have and you kind of keep plugging away. And you don't want to the morale of the other teammates, because they're like...

Paul Kesserwani: Because they're seeing the same thing you are! And they're like, "oh my god, why did they bring this person on board?" And so the longer you keep that person on board, that you're actually damaging the morale of the rest of the people sitting around them, right.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I agree with that. The culture of the company a lot of times comes from the founders, yourself, your, how you operate, how you think. Um what's culture like in your company today?

Paul Kesserwani: The culture has definitely changed over time, as I've changed over time. I'm a extreme workaholic by nature. If somebody doesn't pull me off my desk I will spend the whole day and the whole night at my computer. And that's what I did for the first few years. So I ended up attracting psych- like psychotic workaholic folks who'd come in and have no problem putting in 17, 18 hours. And that was helpful at that time to get the company off the ground, but it is a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you cannot do a marathon at a sprinting pace. And over time you know I, I got married. My wife is incredibly helpful in forcing balance in my life. The more balanced I've been, the more balanced the company has been. And um so the culture does... a lot of it stem from the founder. Employees will look at you like "how is Paul feeling? I'm going to feel the same way." "How's, how hard is Paul pushing? I'm going to push the same way." And so why that might, while that might not be great, that is the reality in an early stage startup. But the culture is definitely um, one thing I am very proud of is we have a great team that really appreciates each other. No one's trying to compete with the person sitting next to one, next to them. Everyone's giving credit to their, to their uh fellow employees. So a lot of our meetings start with "Oh I just want to thank this person for stopping in and helping, I want to thank that person who went above and beyond for me." Because when I worked at Twitter, you know company in hypergrowth attracting a lot of egos. Uh they say one of their core values is "no brilliant jerks," but the reality is that there were a lot of them at the company. Um so we try to make sure to stay clear of that. Because if you're going to put in 15 hours you want to like who you're doing that with.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I totally hear you. Um what's a a scenario or a, not a problem but an issue, but when you started the company you didn't anticipate the, the struggle that it would take to get through to actually build what you're building today, or when you first started seven years ago, something that came up that you didn't anticipate that would be so challenging and you figured it out that you can share with the, with the listeners that would be helpful?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah I mean it's a couple of things that I, I look back and I'm like "This journey has been, has been really rough." I'm very thankful for it but it has been rough. Um one of the things was I had no idea what I was doing when it came to fundraising. So even if, when we had growth and things were up and to the right back like early on, I couldn't fundraise for the life of me! And for our seed round I mean the company got about a 100 plus rejections. We're down to $6,000 in our bank account, $60 to my name personally, and I was on a whole, whole other level of just stress. Um so one of the learnings was how to fundraise, and more, more specifically, how to tell a story. Um early on, first-time founders have no clue how to tell a good narrative. So they go in like "yeah we built this product with these features, look at this chart" and the investor's like "I, I don't give a fuck. You're one of like 50 other companies coming through here probably with better products than you." And I started to learn the art of telling a story. The art of building FOMO, the art of being the wolf and not the sheep when it comes to investors. And that definitely changed the game over time. But that was just you know 100 plus failures to get that first success. I'm like "Okay, I think I see the light a little bit." So fundraising is, is one of them.

Um the other is when you choose to build something unique, our f- bank fee negotiation product, nobody had ever done that before. So we had to you know violate the terms of certain companies, do what we had to do to get this like pirate ship in motion. And you know build this rebellious product. Um you're going to get a lot of pushback. I had Chase call me and like "we're going to shut you guys down, we don't like what you guys are doing." I had like banks calling me saying this, I'm like "Sounds good, click. Back to business." And at first it's scary. And then you have to realize "but we're building this unique thing. If it's, if it was easy it would have been done before. We're going to face obstacles, just keep going." Um and that hasn't you know, that hasn't stopped with our new product for this Buy Now Pay Later aggregator. Once again there's a whole bunch of obstacles along the way, and we're overcoming them. But the mindset is, if, if you, if your mindset is "this is the path I chose, this is expected," you're "oh yeah I expected this, great, carry on business." If you let each up, up and down affect you, you're not going to get very far.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I agree with that. How has AI been part of your company and how has it impacted your company?

Paul Kesserwani: So our domain is cushion.ai, so obviously we're ahead of the game! I'm totally kidding, that means nothing, but I snagged that domain seven, eight years ago. Um so I have this really corny, it's a dad joke that I made a long time ago and it stuck with a bunch of our investors. Which is, at an early stage company or at an early product, AI means "Automate Incrementally" and ML means "Manual Labor". So first you try to do this manually, "do things that don't scale" you know the Y Combinator way. And then, "okay, now how do we put some intelligence behind this thing that we're doing?", then you automate. And eventually if ML is the right solution, you introduce machine learning along the way.

Now for the bank fee negotiation product, it started off 100% manual. We would do the negotiations by hand. And then by the end of it was 93% automated. So we hired a few PhDs in physics, uh natural language processing, and they focus on automating a lot of that. For the Buy Now Pay Later aggregator that we have right now and a lot of our bill pay product, very heavy on the machine learning side. We have multiple PhDs, this is all they focus on. But the big question mark was when ChatGPT really became a thing, we pumped the brakes. And we said "Alright, we spent two years building this bill pay product with all this unique functionality. What if three smart guys out of Stanford just decide to rip this off tomorrow using OpenAI from day one, what happens to us?" So we pumped the brakes on what we were doing and said, "Let's try to kill our own company with OpenAI." And so that the team of PhDs set out to build a Cushion competitor using that. And they failed. They failed because what we were doing needed very specific knowledge that the AI was not trained on. So we know we have a moat. The question mark is how long is that moat for? Will ChatGPT in like six months or a year be able to do what we're doing? So we're just capitalizing on the moat we have today and then supercharging the features that we're developing on top of it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. We've covered a lot of ground here and I can't believe 40, 45 minutes already gone so quickly. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think is valuable, worth sharing?

Paul Kesserwani: Um I, I think there are just a couple of things. One is for founders who are currently building companies, have been at it for a couple of years, it's incredibly helpful to take a step back and check out the landscape. The fundraising landscape. Because the goal posts have changed completely. Uh we're a Series A startup, and a few years ago if you had you know 30% net new user month-over-month growth with a few million in ARR and whatnot, you can go raise another round. Now investors want to see you know profitability. And that changes your product roadmap completely. It goes from building features to grow quickly to working on margins and just flipping that over. So that's, I think that's very helpful for founders to take a step back and reevaluate.

And then two is going back to the AI question, which is really understanding where is this going? And is the product that we've built over years and years, will this be defensible six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now? And if the answer is no, you might want to start working on a contingency plan ASAP. And, and the last is just using AI to supercharge your day-to-day throughput. So we don't have a marketing team. We're a pretty lean uh you know group here. And we've just been using OpenAI and like their ChatGPT in so many different aspects of our day-to-day business to just expedite getting things done. So if companies are not doing that they're definitely very far behind at this point.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I want to touch on that point a little bit more. Can you get specific on how, and how OpenAI or ChatGPT has been useful? You mentioned marketing, but specifically give us a couple examples.

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah. So one of the examples is I was applying to speak at a conference. I wanted to you know get on stage and talk about what we've been building. And the application was due I think within like two hours, like the deadline was approaching. I had been super swamped, completely forgot about it. So I downloaded the description of the conference from the conference website into ChatGPT to give it context as to what I was talking about. And then I said "here are some of the questions, help me fill out the answers. And then um give me a catchy phrase, a catchy line for the, for the session and all of that." Then the, the application asked me to, to answer which bucket I was in, like which are the four tracks, and they're so confusing I couldn't figure out which track we're in! So I just asked ChatGPT and it said "Oh you're clearly in track three for all these reasons." So that's the perf- example of something that would have taken several hours for me to process, write out manually, I did in about 20 minutes, got a spot in the conference and I'll be presenting you know in two months. Um so just, just things like that.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Um Paul, if people want to find Cushion where can they find your app or your company? And if they want to connect with you, how would they do that?

Paul Kesserwani: Yeah so uh to try out Cushion just go to cushion.ai, that's probably the easiest way to do it. Um you can follow me on, on Twitter @ThePaulK, I don't tweet very much. Or just connect with me on LinkedIn. Um but yeah, feel free to reach out. Happy to, happy to chat.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Paul, a big shout out to you for jumping on today, really appreciate your time and spending that with us. And for all our listeners out there listening, appreciate you spending your time with us as well. I look forward to catching up with you Paul in the future and seeing how things go, and with our listeners on the next episode. Until then, take it easy.

Paul Kesserwani: Thanks Jake. Appreciate it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: 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 epis-, 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.  

‍