Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Cody Barbo, co-founder and CEO of Trust & Will. Cody, welcome to the show.
Cody Barbo: Hey, thanks Jake. Great to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, happy to have you here. For the listeners that don't know, I went to San Diego State and so did Cody. Let's go.
Cody Barbo: Yeah. Go Aztecs.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: This is our first time talking. So there's I'm sure we could play the name game and we know each other as friends and blah blah blah. But when I went to school at San Diego State and it was probably before you did, it was like the party capital of the US and it was like a real like fun place to be. It wasn't actually known for some of the things you see it today known for. It's a lot harder to get into than when I went there. But what was interesting, what came out of it was I was in a fraternity and some of my fraternity brothers built companies that were at the time kind of unknowns and became pretty well-known brands. So for example, Rockstar Energy Drink was one of them. Volcom was another. More regionally was Wahoo's Fish Taco. So some like really entrepreneurial-minded people came out of my group of friends.
And Cody, looks like you kind of are on that, on that same track. You went to SDSU and you know, been an entrepreneur and so I want to kind of maybe dive a little bit deeper into, you know, what was it that kind of shaped you and early experiences of becoming an entrepreneur and kind of what led you to, to build what you created today.
Cody Barbo: Yeah. You know I, I like telling the story that like, I don't, I don't come from money. My mom and dad worked hospitality in you know, casino industry mostly for my dad. But like my mom worked like you know, she was a cocktail waitress for most of her life. She still serves today at seventy years old. Not that she has to. I think she just likes people.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Nice.
Cody Barbo: But, you know, they raised my brother and I and like, I would define like probably like middle class or even upper middle class. So, I had a great upbringing. But, they were always just kind to people. And I think for my brother and I, you know, I went to San Diego State. He went to UCLA, his younger brother. And, you know, I didn't study entrepreneurship. I didn't think I would be an entrepreneur. But the one thing at San Diego State that like really I think put me on this path, I can say it with confidence today, is I learned how to network so well at San Diego State. And I, you know, I joined a fraternity and you get the... we had the party school vibes too for sure when I was there, 2007 to 2011. I think we're still on the Playboy top 10 party list now that like, that doesn't even exist anymore.
But you know, San Diego State is one of the top research universities in the country and a powerhouse. They're one of the top five most applied to schools in the country. 100,000 applicants per year. It's really hard to get in there and they think they're a top 200 university, public university in the world. It's like an incredible school now, which makes us look better than when we were there, I guess.
But, you know, there's something in the water, I swear, because the way that you talked about Wahoo's and Rockstar and Volcom, we had our version of that during my exact five-year period. It was Pura Vida Bracelets. You know, those guys built and exited that company to Vera Bradley. You've got Cuts Clothing, which is like one of the leading men's wear companies out there, like with Vuori and Rhoback and others. You've got Sand Cloud Towels, which they're... these guys are now in like the Capital One small business credit card commercial. Like I was like sitting on the couch during March Madness, lost my mind when I see like Brandon and Stephen and, and their co-founder up on TV. And there was just something happening, like it's just unbelievable to see the success of a bunch of Aztecs from my time now, the equivalent of what you had in your time. And I, I feel like the networking chops really is the, the catalyst to getting me to where I am today. Just you learn how to talk to people and it's like such a core part about doing business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When I started this podcast, I had this vision to go behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder in Silicon Valley where I'm born and raised. And weekly, we dive deep in the trenches to find the wins, the losses, and the lessons learned with the hopes that it helps you run a better startup. But here's the thing. If you've gotten any value out of these conversations or been inspired at all, hit the subscribe button. And I get it. Your podcast feed's probably overflowing. But to stay up to date what's going on in Silicon Valley, stick with us because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to build something that matters. And we're better when we do it together. So hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. Now, let's get back to the show.
Yeah, I know. It changed my life. I'll just for those that don't know, I was a, you know, an introvert for the most part. I grew up surfing in the Santa Cruz area. So, I went to San Diego State to surf. That was like, you know, I had like a few options.
Cody Barbo: Yeah, it's not at the beach, but it did, it was close enough. And so, I was living in South Mission. It was great.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: This is like my dream. You know, I get educated and surf. And you know in that process just realize that you know there's fraternities are like a great place to kind of build friendships but also you know kind of build your character too. And so that really changed who I became in terms of just the networking aspect of it. And that was just a huge benefit you know not just then but also even today that I look back on. And so to, to kind of to know that the scope of San Diego State was, you know, that big then and still is and continues to, to, to provide great innovators is, I just, it's an incredible, incredible place to be. But yeah, it is something in the water. So you, you were in the water. Yeah. Huntington Beach, San Diego State. Yeah. Was Trust & Will your first startup or walk us through that.
Cody Barbo: No, I mean I, I was in a lot of student leadership roles in college. So, I remember I didn't want to join a fraternity. I had no intentions. I joined a fraternity. I was pledge class president because the guys that were self-nominating, I was like, "I can, I'm better than these guys." But that, that pledge class president led to an executive role the next year that led to chapter president, which led to the Interfraternity Council president. So, overseeing all of the men's fraternities. And then eventually student body president, which at some schools isn't a big deal. It's just student government on a small scale. San Diego State, it's 35,000 students. And while you're student body president to represent those 35,000 students, which is undergrads, graduates, international students, we're one of the largest state schools in the state of California and also by a byproduct that one of the largest public schools in the country.
So it gave me this kind of unbelievable MBA-like experience for the one year where I was getting to rotate to all the 23 CSU campuses, go through California State Student Association to kind of fight for student rights. And then on the flip side for the one year you're CEO of Associated Students, which is like a $40 million 501(c)(3) nonprofit auxiliary org to the university. We manage and operate seven on and off-campus facilities from Viejas Arena where the basketball team plays to the Mission Bay Aquatic Center and the ARC Recreation Center, everything in between. We had 80 full-time employees, a thousand part-time employees. And like, I can recite that with precision. I don't... it's 2011. It's like 15 years later now in my head. I was 21 and I had that responsibility and it got me exposure to university leadership, our biggest donors, state politicians, local politicians. It was like an unbelievable year that changed my life.
And that's what put me down this path of not wanting to work for someone else. I was like, "Hey, I kind of like this role of CEO and, and top dog and decision maker because you can get the right people in place and like really see vision executed well with the right team and capital behind it." And that was at 21. That was incredible. So I massively disappointed my parents and said, "Hey, I'm going to start a company."
So my first startup was called Niche. And this is like right at the onset when Instagram was taking off. I don't even think Snapchat really existed yet. In 2012, 2012, 2013, and you know, my co-founder Ethan and I, he's still a great friend. We, we were doing the whole startup thing in San Diego. We were, you know, got to pitch on stage at TechCrunch. We tried pitching investors, but we just did, you know, a lot of things that were fun and cool in terms of like trying to build something. And we had access to the startup resources on campus because Ethan was two years younger than me. So, I took advantage of that as I was wrapping up my time at State. I was like, "Oh, I could still piggyback on his student resources."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: So, that kind of saved us some time and money on like legal and getting our, our brand out there. But, we, we really should have moved the business. If I could go back in time, like we should have moved up to Venice, Santa Monica, where like really social media was having a moment or just gone up to the Bay Area. And I think the types of investors that we would have pitched was just vastly different. We were pitching a bunch of old like retired angel investors on the future of social media, right? And they weren't even on like LinkedIn or Facebook or anything. So we did like a year and a half of that business, put I don't know probably like 30, 40,000 of money into it and it just, it didn't work. And, but it was a very special time because it was fun and my first like foray into this journey.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, you know, proximity is power. And so yeah, location does have an impact from investors to visibility to talent to a lot of things when it's, when, when you're building a company. And I know I, I started a company in San Diego. We, we did get acquired, but it was a different world. It was...
Cody Barbo: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Older, older generation and a lot of networking there too. But ultimately, you know, being from Silicon Valley, that's where we're seeing a lot of innovation happen. So, you started a company, you learned a lot, and then what was the idea that came to bear where you thought, "You know, here's a space of something that we could disrupt and let's have a go at, at, you know, what you're building today."
Cody Barbo: Yeah. Well, for that first business, the idea, so this is when Facebook had opened. I remember you probably remember, it was 'The Facebook,' it was like that was hard like you could just be with your college friends and be a little ridiculous on there. But when it opened up to everybody, so all social networks were going macro. The more followers, more engagement. We're like, what if we went micro into a more niche network of different friends and groups of people? And that's why we called the company Niche. But you know, when that business we didn't, I don't want to say it was a failure... like when Facebook tried to buy Snapchat in fall of 2013, it went from like very few players to dozens of very well-funded competitors of what we were trying to do very quickly.
So, in the transition time, I went and I was living in downtown, bunch of great restaurants. My, my wife now, but girlfriend at the time, and a bunch of my friends were working in restaurants, making pretty good money, like all cash tips. Like, yeah, I was like, "I'm just going to go do this until I figure it out." And I worked at a really nice restaurant, helped open it. We had 160 people that helped open that restaurant. It was part of Darden's Restaurant Group, public company, Fortune 100, best company to work for. And, and I was blown away by the experience that I had in a very short period of time. I went from like maître d' to like being offered a management opportunity. And they were like, "Hey, we're going to fly you out to Orlando. We're going to put you through our management training program and you'll go be a GM at one of our spots and it comes with like very generous salary, 401k benefit." I was 23. I was like, "This sounds amazing."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: Like I was like, "Man, let's just do what my mom and dad did because they, they provided well for my brother and I." But I was like, "Why me?" That was like my thinking. I was like, "Well, why me?" Because we had all these people working there. And then this is like what got me thinking about, "Well, I'm on LinkedIn. Why don't restaurant people use LinkedIn?" And I started asking my managers in the front of house and the back of house like, "Are you on LinkedIn?" And they were like, "What's LinkedIn?" And I'm like, "It's like, it's like a resume version of Facebook." Like this sounds weird to even say today that way. That's why I pitched it to them.
And I realized pretty quickly that hospitality people don't use LinkedIn, especially at that time. And it's like again, 2013. And I was like, "Oh shit." I was like, "Well, is there something here that, is there comparable? Like is there like another industry that's doing a LinkedIn platform and has had success?" And I found two that were Series A stage at the time. RallyPoint that was doing it for military, and then Doximity who's doing it for medical professionals. And I talked to both founders. They gave me their time and I was like, "I'm all in. I'm going to go do this for restaurant people."
I pulled in some co-founders. And we ended up raising millions of dollars for the business. In 2013 through 2017, we had hundreds of thousands of users. So these are job seekers looking to get a job at a restaurant, bar, hotel.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay.
Cody Barbo: And then the value prop to the small business owner was generally like SMBs to like regional restaurant groups. We had a couple enterprise deals, but the pitch to them was, "Hey, we've got this product that you can see people like a picture of them or a photo of their food or a video of them introducing themselves." It's like there's so much personality importance in the front of house, and then for the heart of house, you could showcase a dish that you could cook in a video or a photo, but not on a paper resume. So, we were able to take this like 120% turnover that's plagued the restaurant industry for decades, reduce it, help them hire the right person the first time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Cody Barbo: Walk them through the recruitment cost. Like, on average, it cost $4,500 to recruit, hire, and train somebody. And if you lose them a month later because they showed up drunk or no-showed or you fired them for, you know, throwing a drink at a customer. Like, there's all these things that came up that we're like, "You should try our platform." And we priced it competitively with Craigslist, which is what the industry was mostly using at the time, right? So, we, we figured out our go-to-market strategy. We were building a brand. We had 25 employees. We're in downtown San Diego and we raised venture for this business.
And then I walk in, and this for your listeners, this is part of the ups and downs of the startup journey. This is the going dark for a moment here, but like I walk into the boardroom June 15th, 2017, and it was a morning meeting. I knew the investors would be in town because I had a sales call. Walk into the boardroom and I'm told by my co-founder and the investor, "You're out, gone, like you're done." And it was so sudden and quick that like I didn't like really process what was happening like in this 20, 30 minute meeting. But I was like, "I don't think you guys are making the right decision here." And like, you know, obviously wanted to stay on. I was like, "If I'm not the right person to be CEO, like put me in another role or like let me stay on the board. Like I'm... this is my idea. Like I'm all in on business. I've like love, love, love what we do." And it wasn't anything that I'd done wrong. They wanted to take the business in a different direction.
So that was my last day at the company that I had started and was at for almost four years. And then within six weeks we were starting Trust & Will. But like the outcome of Industry for your listeners' interest is like they tried to pivot into this Initial Coin Offering when ICOs, these unregulated ICOs were happening in crypto back in 2017. They were going to launch Industry Token to tokenize hospitality exchange so you could buy food and beverage and you know, bottle service with Industry Token. And crypto was on a rocket ship. So like the narrative made sense as kind of a cash grab in my mind, but I was like, "Okay, very opposite of our mission." Like we're a very mission-aligned company, but at the same time, maybe I wasn't the right leader. Maybe there is a better reason for one of my co-founders to lead that business. And that's, that's what happened.
But you know, crypto bubble popped in 2018 at the beginning of the year and like they just defaulted back to the core business that we were running. But like I feel like the business, not that it was solely me, we had a, we had 25 people when I was CEO, but like it lost its soul. Like it lost its purpose. It lost its mission. And your listeners won't see this, but my coaster on my desk still to this day is my, our logo from our last company, Industry. It's like my little, you know, chip on my shoulder memento. I love that business and I still have a lot of really good friends in that business. But I share that story because it is, it is a crazy one that most founders haven't gone through.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I, I just want to touch base on that a little bit more. So that happened, and it happens to a lot of founders, and one of the challenges of starting a company is you got to pick the right people and you got to make sure you're aligned and you're going in the right direction. What is it that you learned from that? What was the big takeaway from that experience? Because we've talked to a lot of companies that's happened to them, right? And so what was your, the lesson that you, you kind of moved forward from that that made you better?
Cody Barbo: Who you take money from matters a lot. And I think that a couple things. One, your company is not your identity. So like I feel like when I was fired, I felt like I lost a little bit of my identity. It was like too tied up in that business. With Trust & Will, and we'll get to Trust & Will, like I wear the polo like I'm wearing a jersey. Like if it's like when you get your favorite player trades teams, like they're still one of the, you know, greats.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Right.
Cody Barbo: But you might be a little sad that they're no longer on your team, but it's... they'll be okay. And like I feel that way about Trust & Will. Like I love Trust & Will. Like if I'm in this seat in perpetuity, I'm always going to love what I'm doing here and I'm going to work my ass off. But your company is not your identity. Like I've got a wife. I've got two kids. I have my own identity. I'm a fraternity brother, a friend, a neighbor, a son to, you know, two parents. Like I, I have, I'm Cody Barbo first and foremost. I'm not Trust & Will. But while I'm at this chapter of my life running the company, I'm all in on Trust & Will 100%. And I think founders, you can be too... your identity can be too tied to the business or project that you're working on. And it can actually hurt your you know ambitions in some ways.
The second is you can't protect yourself. Like when you give up equity in your business, like Shark Tank, it's like, you know, "10% for 100k," your business is valued at a million. You got a minority investor. Now, in the venture world, like you're giving up governance. Usually, you're giving up board seats. And you don't realize when things are good, yeah, everything should be fine. But when one snag hits or a series of, of snowballs start to take effect, like you can get pushed out pretty quick. Like CEO is first to go. Like you have to be comfortable in the CEO spot. If you're going to give up board seats and give up equity, like your job, there's always going to be some job security. If you're not willing to step down, you will be removed from your business if things aren't going well, to change the leadership to try to change the outcome and direction of the business. So, I think I've come to accept that more so with where I'm at in Trust & Will. I've been in this role for eight years now. But I, I know what it's like to go through it.
And you can protect yourself a little bit. You can negotiate into the, the rounds that you raise and into the term sheets a stronger employment agreement, stronger separation language. Unless, unless you're like Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel at, at you know, Snapchat and you put these like founder voting shares, you could be a minority shareholder from an equity perspective but control all the voting rights, which is Mark Zuckerberg and Elon. That's why nobody can touch them. Right. Their business is their identity. Like that is true form. Like it's weird even associate like Elon didn't found Tesla, he just...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I know, that's crazy.
Cody Barbo: Controller of you know governance to a certain extent. That's why he has so much influence there. And same with Zuck at Meta. There's so many investors that own Meta, but he has so much control. It is really still his company 20 years in. So I, I, we didn't choose that path with Trust & Will. We're like, we want to be more thoughtful about who we let into our cap table. I was just talking to an entrepreneur earlier today like, "You were giving the investor the opportunity to invest in your business, join your company, your journey, your timeline. And if you don't like the terms, if they're egregious terms, like you could walk from them. Like you're giving the investor the opportunity. It's not the other way around." So, I've really like leaned into that narrative with founders. And you know, like just getting fired sucked, but I'm kind of happy it happened because like I know what it's like to go through it and like there's light on the other side. And for me that was starting my third business, which is going pretty well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I know there's a lot to be learned going through the ups and downs as a leader and there's a lot to, to move forward with, and you're always looking for that next idea. So to go from a company that was really your identity to for some aspect of it, to 6 weeks later starting Trust & Will... had that, was that an idea that had been percolating for a while, or I mean, how'd that come about?
Cody Barbo: I was sitting, I was sitting at, you're going to laugh, I shouldn't even... I was sitting on a really silly idea that actually was very convinced would be a big business. And I still think it could be a big business eight years later. And I started pitching this other business idea to a couple angel investors that I was close to and they're like, "It's interesting. What else you got?" I was like, "Okay." So it just was fortunate that Daniel, my co-founder and president here at Trust & Will, Daniel and I have been friends for 10 years. He also got fired from his job and we had met up for coffee August of 2017. So eight, eight years to the month recording this podcast with you today. And we sat down for coffee and the irony is that we talked about crypto because like despite me hating crypto for the firing purposes, I was making money on crypto, which was great.
We were like, "What happens to your crypto if you get hit by a bus?" It was like a weird 10 a.m. like coffee. We're at the Moniker Coffee in, in Liberty Station in Point Loma. We're like, "What happens to crypto?" I was like, "Dude, I'm getting married." I was like, "My wife doesn't care about crypto. She cares about like me as a person. Like what happens to Trust & Will or what happens to us if, if something doesn't happen and we, my wife..." I was like, "We never talked about money, estate planning, life insurance, and taxes."
So Daniel and I, we went from like a coffee chat to like an afternoon text thread, to like the next day we're like, "Hey, let's talk more about that estate planning thing," and then the next day, "Let's meet up and actually like start whiteboarding some stuff." I have... it's so funny because I have photos of all the whiteboarding sessions we did, but like it was like late August, September, October for 3 months. We were just whiteboarding trying to figure out what is estate planning? Why do people don't have it? Why are people so uncomfortable talking about it? And why is it so archaic? Offline, expensive, people spend thousands of dollars with attorneys.
And we started interviewing estate attorneys. We're like, "Do you turn people away that can't afford you?" Like, all the time. Like what a, what a sham situation. People that want to do this already daunting task that now can't afford it and what are the other options they're left with. So like there's like free will templates you can download online still today, and that's fine if you want to choose that route. But like if you're putting 70, 80, 90 years of your life on this earth and you have a family and you have assets, like you might want to take a little bit more of an investment approach to like, "I should do this the right way and like guarantee my legacy."
So we're like, well, TurboTax is great. TurboTax, you could file with the IRS directly, but you could go to TurboTax, pay, you know, 20 to 200 bucks, and it's like a very great customer experience. The product is slick, their support is great. They're a trusted brand. You see them throughout football season all the way through, you know, playoff games until tax season is over. And we're like, "TurboTax serves 45 million households. Like, what if estate planning could serve 45 million households? Like, what does that version of this business look like?"
And then on top of that, we looked at the wealth transfer. 124 trillion of assets are going to pass between generations over the next 25 years. And we're like, the largest wealth transfer in human history in the United States, most of that wealth is in the United States. And now, while everyday families, you're not going to be a billionaire through an inheritance. But like on average, you might make like a couple hundred thousand to a couple million, if mom and dad passed and they had a 401k with a million in it, if they had a home value in California with a million or two value, like it adds up pretty quick. And if you have everything buttoned up, everything transfers pretty seamlessly versus what most people end up dealing with is probate. You die with a will or you die without an estate plan, it's called dying intestate. The government decides like what a, what a great experience people get to go through when the government can take one to two years. Family members that you may not have any really affiliation or relationship with could come out of the woodworks and say, "Well, I was there for mom or dad." Like, you haven't even talked to them in 10 years. "Why I'm their son." You know, it creates a lot of stress and tension and it could lead to a lot of legal trouble. So, we're like, "Well, this sucks. This sucks for most people. Like, how do we make that better?" And that's when we went down this rabbit hole and said, "We're going to go do this." And that's, that's the, the founding story of Trust & Will.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, it's great. I mean, for the listeners that haven't done this before, and I did it the old school way, and it takes time, it takes effort, and there's, you know, lawyers involved, and it's like a process. And then you're hoping you make the right choice. And then if you got to make changes, they charge you again. And it's like, there's, it's pretty daunting. But what's the user experience like? So, you know, you're a young family, you've got kids or whatever it happens to be. Is it all online? Do you have to bring in legal teams? Like, what's the, what's that look like?
Cody Barbo: Yeah, we make it really easy. So, if you go, you go to trustandwill.com today, whether you saw our TV commercials or you heard about us through your financial advisor, you saw a deal in your credit card rewards app or you're Google searching or if you're on Chat... Chat is a great revenue source for us, now you're on ChatGPT, "How do I create a will?" and you end up on our website. We assume you know nothing about estate planning at all, but you took enough interest to come to our website and we're really trying to figure out where are you at in life. Did you just get married? You just having your, you first child? You buying your first home or dealing with the darker realities of life? You lost a parent, you're going through a divorce, you have a, a diagnosis or a terminal diagnosis. Like there's real urgency. Like there's, there's 27 million life triggering events per year in this country that could bring people to trustandwill.com. And we have millions of people coming to our website every year.
So when you come to the website, it's very straightforward. We sell will-based plan for individuals and for couples at, at 200 and 300 bucks. And we have a trust-based plan for individuals and couples at, at 400 and $500. And the price point is to be digestible so it's not going to break the bank. And when people get started, it's filling out information about your family, your kids, all of your assets. So you own a house, cars, do you have life insurance policy, retirement accounts, do you have crypto? Do you have valuables like art, collectibles, excuse me? And from there, it's then if you do have children, do you have guardians in mind for your children? If you want your kids to get everything at 18, that's not commonly recommended, but you could also put control provisions in there. So if you have kids get money a little bit at 18, a little bit at 24, a little bit at 30, you have complete control over that. The distributions, healthcare decisions, if something happens to you, you're incapacitated, who can make decisions on your behalf, medical and/or financial, all the way through the like real morbid side of our documents. Do you want to be buried or cremated? Or in states like California, it can be composted. There's states with human compost so the worms can eat you or you could go drop a body out with the sharks off, off the coast there. It's like you have a lot of really unique options and you're in control, and that's what I love about it.
So it takes about 30 minutes or less. It's a couple hundred bucks. You can go start to finish on your own really seamlessly. We do have great support. We're known for our five-star support. So we have humans, actual humans in addition to AI five days a week. And then we have a 350 person attorney network in all 50 states. You get like real peace of mind building, that's, that, it's an upsell that's a couple hundred bucks. But it's also if you have complexity potentially or you have a blended family, it's really reassuring to have an actual licensed trust and estate attorney talk to you based on what you... you still go through the software flow but they can review the documents with you. They can go through scenario planning. But we've, we've built this into like the industry best experience that now a million people have signed up and chosen to protect their legacy with us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So the business model is you pay for the, the actual trust and the will. Is there like reoccurring subscription fees? Like, you know as an entrepreneur, you know, you do one action and you get paid for it, but like looking forward, and you've raised, you know, $83 million, like the investors are looking at the business going, "Okay, this is great, more families to go ahead and use the product in the future. What other services? What other products? What, what's the engaging aspect of the, of the platform?"
Cody Barbo: In addition, most of our customers, in addition to the upfront fee, we have an annual membership. So, it's not a product that you'd use like every week or even every month, but like maybe once a year, a couple times a year, thinking about, you know, you have family dynamics change, parents getting older, you move states, you buy a new house, stuff can come up, but there's no forced membership. It's all opt-in, but it starts at 45 bucks a year. The ultimate win is peace of mind. Everything's stored securely online. And if you have anything in life that changes or happens, that's the fee that you pay to come back and make the change. It, it starts at 45 bucks a year. We also have a 299 tier. That's our premium tier that comes with the attorney support.
And we have a ton of AI functionality now that includes Plan Strength, which is kind of cool. It's like a credit score. It's like an industry first credit score for your estate plan. We have goal planning that you can do. So, if you are going to grow your family or you're planning to get married or buy a house, we can kind of guide you down the path of what your future estate planning needs could look like based on your personal wealth and financial and family goals. We also have this AI assistant that we rolled out earlier this year that's really slick. Like, it's so, it's, you'd expect it from any tech company today. In the traditional world, you like don't remember what you put in your estate plan in that free ring binder with the attorney. I don't know when you did it, Jake, like 10 years ago. And if you pick up the phone and call that attorney, they're going to charge you. They're going to charge you an hour of time or maybe half an hour to like go find who are the guardians to your kids when you can just log into Trust & Will and ask the AI assistant, "Hey, who are the guardians of my kids?" And it spits it back in real time. Like, that, that quick.
And then we also try to help people make sure that their estate plan is up to date. So if you create the estate plan, whether it's with an attorney or with us, you have to execute the documents with signature, notary, witnesses. We make that really easy. If you're setting up a trust, which the value of setting up a family trust versus just a will, a will will still go to probate, which is fine. It's, it provides clarity on inheritance, but a trust avoids probate when the assets are funded. So, meaning you put your house in the trust, you put your financial accounts in the name of the trust. So, we have a trust funding guide that comes with that. And then the Plan Strength, the AI assistant, the attorney, like all those layers of value add come in to like basically make sure that your estate plan is always up to date and if anything in life changes, we're here to help you change it in an efficient manner. So, that's the recurring revenue piece of the business on a consumer. Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I like that. Sounds like you're basically, you've got an irresistible offer. The buying price is low. It's something that has huge value for you as a family member or just as an individual for a lifetime. And it doesn't break the bank every time you have to go back to it. I mean, for me personally, just my story is I think I paid like two grand just to start the process.
Cody Barbo: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And then, you know, you got to get people to sign off on it and then there's back and forth changes. And then you have to update things, you know, every time you make any sort of change internally with your friends or family. And ultimately it's in the back of your mind. But yeah, you're right. Every time I pick up that phone, you know, there's a couple hundred bucks and a couple hundred more. Then you're like, uh, why can't we make this like easier? I just want to just do everything online.
Cody Barbo: You know, that was like I just we just expected like when we started the business, we just expected someone would be doing this. We're like, "Oh, for sure there's somebody who's..."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: "...who's going direct to consumer, who's working with financial advisors, they're working with banks." Very few companies. And we're like, "What the heck?" And you'd seen, you know, Lemonade take off like with the next-gen insurance platform, Credit Karma is the brand that people associate with credit scores, Coinbase for crypto. You know, you can go down the list, TurboTax for taxes, etc. And we're like, "How is no one solved for this?" So, that's what's kept us going. We've got 115 people across all, we have 20, 29 states with people on them now. People are here for like really like serious but practical reasons. Like they're starting their family or they've lost someone in their life or they've gone through a health scare and they want to help their friends and family. So a lot of our team members are customers obviously of Trust & Will. And it's pretty cool that like whenever we're thinking about product strategy we can always really easily inject our own personal situation into product roadmap and it's always practical because we're a product for the everyday family. We're not for billionaires. Like there's any billionaires listening, please don't use Trust & Will, use your high-priced attorney. But like 95% of households are in our strike zone. So that's why we built the consumer brand.
So I don't know if the listeners have seen our TV commercials. But we've got like this character. His name's Eddie, but he's kind of like our Jake from State Farm.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: And he always takes like a playful approach on the life triggering events to like educate people on why estate planning versus like the assumptive like, "Oh, you just like write it down on a piece of paper." Like "everybody inherits their dad's truck." Like, well, it's always better in an estate plan. And then we've got a Matthew Stafford of the Rams. We've done two commercials with him. We got our new spot and Coach McVay and, and our... that's really fun. California is the biggest state. It's obviously our biggest customer base. And he, he had a personal connection to estate planning, too. I sat next to him on a flight of all places. And you know, his wife Kelly had a brain tumor. They've got four kids, four young girls. He's very knowledgeable. Like at a human level, you take all the wealth and success some people have. It is a human thing to think about your own mortality or if you lose your spouse or partner. So we've been really fortunate to have the buy-in of, of endorsements and we go to market through TV, radio, podcast, and search. And then 40% of our business is growing through partnerships with banks, credit unions, fintechs, and large, large broker dealers and RIAs who have financial advisors that are like the gatekeepers to their clients' money and wealth.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Have you, I don't know, have you worked with Acorns? It's a fintech company.
Cody Barbo: Yeah. Yeah. We're the founder, one of the founders and the current CEO are angel investors in Trust & Will. And on their family tier, it's a plug for Acorns. If you're an Acorns family tier subscriber, you get a free will. They're, they're one of the first fintechs in the country to offer a free will to their premium tier subscription, which is mostly parents with kids.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Yeah. Slight story, sidestep story on this one. Acorns brought us in in 2012. We, we recruit. That's what we do as a company. And they brought us in. It was six people and it was Jeff Cruttenden and his father.
Cody Barbo: Our investors. Yeah. Jeff, one of our investors.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, okay. Great. And they brought us in. They said, "Look, we're I think we're going to try and build this like fintech company and we have like six people and here's the vision. Here's, can you help us?" And we jumped in and, you know, started helping them recruit, build their engineering team and their mobile team. And fast forward today, they're I don't know like 350 employees and they've raised close to a billion dollars or over that. And great brand, great story, but you know, solving a pro- a pro- a problem for consumers, you know, that doesn't cost a lot to do and they can build and grow and that's an incredible story. So, I'm glad you guys are connected with them. We have a lot of companies like that that have done pretty well I can connect you with as well after if it helps you guys build your...
Cody Barbo: Anyone in financial services that is like our from a distribution perspective. If you're in financial services, whether you're a bank, a credit union, a fintech, that is, that is where we strike hit the strike zone because most of those families are taking a proactive action and trying to protect their, their wealth and build their wealth. Um, and then after that, it's like the insurtechs. Anybody who's doing life insurance is usually a pretty good partner for us because if you're setting up a life insurance policy, you should probably be setting up an estate plan or vice versa.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: 100%. Yeah, it's fun. Cool. What's the biggest challenge for the company currently?
Cody Barbo: I mean, it, it is the honest thing. Like our biggest competition is procrastination. Consumers are, we're natural procrastinators when it comes to everything that isn't like a consum- a consumable, right? Like when it come, "Oh you should better manage your money. You should set up the life insurance. You should get into better tax planning or try to get a lower rate on your mortgage." So there's such a financial literacy gap in this country. Estate planning really is severely neglected. So it's getting in front of as many people as possible. Our whole business is a massive funnel. And over the last seven years, we went from nobody knowing any online estate planning brands at all to one in four Americans now have seen Trust & Will's ads and should know us. So the goal is to get as much awareness as possible. So it's, that's, that's one easy part of it.
The second is now that we're a more mature business, you know, we're in the tens of millions of revenue. We have ambitions to take the company public in the coming years. For the, for the listeners, not those seeing this, I have a Texas Stock Exchange hat on. I was, I was at the New York Stock Exchange Texas launch earlier. It was very big time for public companies in Texas. But that's our aspiration is to be a public company and to keep building. But you know, we have to get the business really tight, buttoned up, be public market ready in the next two to three years. So that comes with building out our board of directors including independent directors, building out our c-suite management team, all of the like, I don't call it the boring stuff... like we have audited financials now two years in a row from Deloitte. We've got board subcommittees. It's really just like creating a very polished, solid foundation so that once we hit like 150, 200 million revenue run rate, we are in a position where we could go public and you have to just be really intentional about everything you do at this stage.
So surrounding yourself with really good management team helps with that because I'm 36. Like I'm, I'm young. This is the furthest I made it today, this interview, and I've got some very experienced executives, both c-suite and VPs and senior talent on our team. They've been further along in their careers, but they took a bet because they believed in the mission of the company. So, I mean, I, I feel like I learned more from them maybe than they learned from me because I just throw wild ideas at them and they bring it to life. But I think getting the right people on board is, is really one of the the best challenges but also biggest opportunities for us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're on a run rate of doing, you know, 45, 50, $50 million in revenue this year, which is great. As a leader, you started, you've evolved the company. What are the breakthroughs that you've seen in yourself that evolved as a, have evolved as a leader that have like changed how you think about the business or change how you think about growth or hiring or just what can you share with other leaders that are also growing and scaling their companies that have been...
Cody Barbo: Yeah, you got to, I mean delegation is key. I, I like what my co-founder says. He tries, he tries to fire himself from every role and I was like "Don't fire yourself out of the company." But like that it is really the truth. I mean I've been CEO since day one when we were you know two guys with an idea, then a third co-founder came in. Then we're a team of five at the seed round. A team of seven hitting the Series A. Team of 20 at the Series B. We were 85 people roughly at the closing of the Series C. We're 115 today. And we were in person before the pandemic. Like I fully expected us to be an in-person company five days a week and then we went virtual. We've got employees across 29 states now.
So I, you know, I think the evolution is like I'm still the founder of the company along with Daniel. We're co-founders, but I've really embraced the title and responsibility of the CEO. There is a polish and prestige you have to like really be intentional about every day. And like I'm for the listeners, I'm wearing a Trust & Will polo. If, if you were to see this live, I wear a Trust & Will polo or shirt every single day religiously because when I put this on, I'm in business mode. When I take this jersey off, I'm dad to two kids. I like to take care of my own health and wellness. But like you have to be so intentional. And sometimes you remove yourself from certain activities and processes. And that's sometimes where gaps can, can open up. Like I stopped, I'll give a specific example to listeners, like when we went into hypergrowth mode going from 20 to 85, I, we used to mandate that at least one of the three co-founders was in every interview, at least not a group interview, so we had some ownership of who we were bringing on to the company and team. And then at a certain point we just stopped doing it and I don't know why, it just you just get busy and distracted with other things.
And then earlier this year I was like, I want to be the final interview again for every role, even interns, part-time hires. And I'm so happy I did that because I get to have this more ceremonial interview, like, "We're probably going to extend an offer to this person unless they say something offensive or weird."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: And, and then I get to know who these people are as they're about to join the company. I get them hyped up and excited for the journey we've been on, but also where we're headed. And then when I get to do an onboarding like I did on, on Thursday, yesterday, we got five new people joining the team. I have personal context. I know Kels in Augusta. We talked about the Masters. I know Chris is in San Diego and we talked about him working with one of our previous colleagues. I know Kate's in Albany, New York. And we talked about her and her kids' love of music. Like I had these little personal details about these new team members as they're starting their first day or their first week at the company. So, it feels a lot more relational even in a virtual business. That's the challenge is you just don't see people that often. And then when I do get to see people, I like will remember that... my brain works this way weirdly, but I'll remember those small details usually. Or like I'll ask them like, "Hey, how's your... Chris said he had four guinea pigs." And I'm like, "How are your four guinea pigs?" Like I don't know, it's been like a week at the company. I'm like, "What are your guinea pigs' names?" Like I should probably know those because they have like a family, you know, impact to you and your family. So little stuff like that is you have to be intentional about it.
It's so hard with so much stuff going on. There's just like constant noise. I get 250 emails a day, another 50 to 100 text messages, another 200 Slack notifications, probably 20 LinkedIn connection invites, another 15 to 20 LinkedIn messages. I've got a Chief of Staff who helps manage that with me. I've now got an executive assistant who's going to even get more refined. I just don't want to ever let an opportunity slip through the cracks because I'm too busy. That's, I hate that excuse. We are intentional about not letting excuses like that be reality. We want to make sure that if we have right opportunities coming our way, we're always available, always accessible, and just trying to put more process and structure behind it, I feel like, is the growth that I want to continue to have. Is like, we are creating this opportunity for ourselves and for our shareholders every day. And I don't want any reason somebody like didn't get an interview who would have been a five-star hire or somebody didn't get to invest because like I didn't respond to their email. We always want to have that, that really high-touch engagement with our stakeholders. So I think that's where my, my brain set has shifted over the last couple years.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Great breakthroughs in leadership. And you know I always like to ask the question, you know, it doesn't have to be in person, but even if it's online, what's like the main mentor in your world today that you look at that helps guide you? It could be a coach, it could be your friend, it could be anybody come to mind that you think is worth sharing because I know that I've got a few and, and it's changed our business.
Cody Barbo: Yeah. Yeah. I've had, I've had executive coaches on and off since the start. One, one person who is like very transformational for me even pre-Trust is a guy named Johnny Buffini who's got a ARC Leadership out of San Diego and him and his colleagues, they're just fantastic people and they really, they want to help unlock your superpowers. I think we get so critiqued on like the things that we're not good at. And I've, I've like really reinforced to my co-founder, to my execs, I'm like, "If I'm not good at something, don't ever expect me to like be better at that thing. Like, just take what I'm good at and let me be those things be my superpowers."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Cody Barbo: And Johnny was really supportive in the earlier years of my entrepreneur journey. Today, I do spend the most time talking to CEOs, though. Like, I go out of my way talking to CEOs who are a couple years ahead of me. I had a call this week with the CEO of Canada's largest private company, or former CEO of 1Password, Jeff Shiner. Built a friendship with him over the years. Like he's just chock full of knowledge and wisdom. I was at this Texas Stock Exchange event at the Cowboy Stadium and they had like a CEO happy hour thing after, and I'm talking to this guy Chris. He's been CEO and founder for 20 years and now it's a public company, you know, hundreds of millions of revenue. I'm like, "What keeps you going?" And he's like, "There's just always something interesting to work on and like it doesn't get old. It always is fresh and exciting," and I'm like, "I love that."
So when I have a challenge though that I'm working through, I've got this like really curated list of CEOs, even Noah at Acorns, that I can reach out to and get perspective on. And it's really you have to be, again, intentional about it. You got to have this curated list of high-touch, high-value connections in your network. And you could go through like an EO or a YPO or you could have like a founders meetup that you do in your local city. But for me being virtual, I just reach, I just reach out to people all the time and sometimes they don't respond but usually they do. And doing karate for your listeners, there's a mosquito. But it's, it's for me it's really helpful because I can kind of self-validate the, the right decisions that we're making or the wrong decisions that we might make if we went a different route. So that's, that's how I kind of get guidance today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, super excited to finally meet you, Cody. I know we spent a few different times trying to get on the pod and finally made it happen. In terms of on the roadmap, what are you excited about as we head into 2026?
Cody Barbo: I'm... I don't think I've, very rarely mentioned AI so far. So, we're going to talk a lot about AI. We, we relaunched our platform and the company is still called Trust & Will, but it's called Estate OS now. Like, AI the last 12 to 18 months, it's like the most exciting time that I literally can remember. I'm 36 years old. Like I remember the dotcom days pretty closely even though I was younger. The tech boom with mobile, mobile apps coming to market was just insane. And with AI it's like it's a complete reset. Like it went from like almost anything's possible to now everything is possible. Like if you have an idea you can build it. You can do it cheaper, faster, quicker. You don't need the team. You don't need the time as much and the resources that you needed even 5 years ago.
Yeah, we've made a pretty significant investment in AI capital and team. And you know, basically my expectation across the entire company is we are an AI-first company now. Every tool that you use in your department, I don't care if you're in marketing, operations, sales, engineering, design, you're using AI, you're going to be more efficient, more effective. It is not here to replace our team. It is here to enhance our team, to uplevel them, upskill them in a way they're going to continue to learn faster and deliver more value to our customers. And that's now the byproduct of internal AI tooling, is now the external AI feature sets that we offer to our customers. We sell to families. We sell to professionals. And I define professionals as financial advisors, nonprofits, attorneys. We've got a bunch of other professionals we'll launch soon. And then the enterprise like we know where hundreds of billions of assets will flow in an inheritance. So when we work with a big bank like Fifth Third Bank and we have tens of thousands of their customers that have used Trust & Will's estate planning tool, we get to help these families retain that multigenerational wealth within the Fifth Third ecosystem. And Fifth Third Bank can help these clients on a multigenerational timeline, not a once- and one-off generation timeline. So AI for us is just making this process quicker, faster, and more effective, more value add back to the customer.
Like you don't have to remember when things are happening. Like we got this life events engine that we're going to launch soon. It's pretty... it's creepy but cool. Like we can kind of like predict when people are like getting married, buying a house, having kids, transacting and, and encouraging them to come back and create updates to the estate plan, make updates. And it's really, it's a great time in tech in general. But for our business, it's cool because we have a huge ecosystem of customers and partners willing to test AI with us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's so cool. Yeah, I know. It's transforming everything. You know, we look at it too and we work with so many startups today, and these are, you know, engineering from the ground up startups, and oftentimes now they're not even interviewing candidates unless they're using Cursor or Windsurf or some of these tools that help them code. They don't want you coming in and coding 100% anymore. They want you to code maybe, you know, 30% or 40% but having the tools do the work for you and then debugging it and making you more efficient. And that's on the engineering side. On the product side, the same thing. On the marketing side, the same thing. So, if you don't have experience with the tools, you're not even getting to the table, which is pretty crazy.
Cody Barbo: Yeah. It's easy to learn, though. I, that's the encouragement. It's like, I think I, I never want AI to be intimidating to somebody though because like you can really come in, like I laughed because my mother-in-law who's in her like mid-60s was like using ChatGPT to like plan her Euro trip the, like for this past month and I was like pretty impressed. And then my dad sends like little like funny images that he creates for my, my two kids to see every morning. He'll text in the family group chat because I've got a 5-year-old and a one-year-old. My brother's got a little kid. And my dad will literally use AI every day to create an image that's silly and it's a one-of-a-kind. And it's like, you don't have to use it always for your work. It can be for fun and for entertainment or for planning a family trip. So I think AI is more accessible than people think. But yeah, but for if you're really serious about your career, like it is table stakes in a high-pace, high-growth environment, and you are fairly compensated, you're over- you maybe additionally compensated if you're proficient in AI tooling.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I want to go back to one thing you brought up where you go to ChatGPT and Trust & Will comes up. So every company's trying to figure out "what do I need to do? Where do I have to go? What content do I have to create? What's my strategy of coming up in the LLMs?" Like what from your perspective, what's worked for you? Did it just naturally happen because you have so much content out there already or did you have a strategy?
Cody Barbo: Yeah, we had a huge... Yeah, huge content strategy going back to 2019. We have hundreds of articles that rank. I think we have 70,000 key terms that we rank for. Domain authority of 72. We have a huge affiliate program where like NerdWallet and all the major names that write about estate planning will rank us like the best rated or the best value added estate planning platform with like a five-star review. And then we have all these external pages with some of the biggest banks. And so our partnership efforts have helped with it. But these are all publicly listed domains. So I've got, the way that we hear SEO in a lot of our marketing worlds. GEO is the new acronym of choice. And there's actually a really cool tool called Profound. They just raised a bunch of money, but it's like Google Analytics for, for these AI search platforms. So when we first signed up for it, I was really reassured like, for ChatGPT, for Perplexity, Copilot, like we're showing up first in all of them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Cody Barbo: And we want to continue to maintain that first result in all of them. And they're driving revenue now, too, which is wild because people can go ahead and click through the link and transact on the website within a couple clicks. So, we're reporting on that to our board and we're continuing to make a lot of investments because it's just like an always being on the cutting edge where we're playing every day. Makes my team uncomfortable because like we might spend two, three months investing in a new tool and then like throw it away the next day 'cause some better tool came out, right? Like twice the processing power and value. So, it's...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I really want to thank you for coming on here, Cody. This has been great. God, I just, I can't wait to see where things go in the future for you. I see the commercials. I love what you guys are doing. I want to end with one note because we're in the people business. Are there any roles that you want to promote now? Does it cost you anything if you're hiring that people might want to hear about or say, "Yeah, let's, I want to apply to that job."
Cody Barbo: Yeah, we have an account executive. We have, if, if you're listening to this like late August through maybe early September, an account executive role for financial institutions. We sell to a lot of banks and credit unions. If you have experience like five to 10 years selling into banks, large financial service companies, like please reach out to myself or David Weissman, our VP of Sales and Partnerships. And then we have a bunch of... we have, we have a couple data roles right now, data engineer roles. We have so much data and so much potential with our data. That is probably the ultimate value, enterprise value we're creating at Trust & Will is data. And then we also have a bunch of sales roles that we'll be opening up for our advisor channel. So if you sold into broker dealers and RIAs, you've worked with financial advisors, we have some sales roles that are going to be opening up pretty soon here and we'll continue to be hiring for that department for, for the years to come. It's a huge channel. We work with 20,000 financial advisors today and if you're looking for a career change, we're a great company to work for.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love it. Yeah. Well, cool. Cody, if they want to find Trust & Will, where do they go?
Cody Barbo: trustandwill.com or, or shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Cody Barbo, let me know that you were a listener to the podcast. And Jake, really appreciate the time today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining and thank you for the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me that you spent your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. I can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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