Why Plaid’s COO cold-calls new hires | Eric Sager (COO of Plaid)

Brett: I'm curious to get your perspective on what is unique about leading a company in moments of incredible dynamic change that's very different than leading a company when that's not the case. So, you join and it feels like things are relatively ho-hum for maybe 18 months. Then you have the pandemic, then you have Visa M&A, then you have FinTech is dead, market implosion, and then you have AI. What's unique about running a decent portion of the company and the role of COO through those specific times?

Eric: So, I feel at least as far as my journey at Plaid is concerned, in a weird way, there's nothing unique about it because at almost a step there was something like that.

Brett: We should talk about the three weeks or it wasn't that.

Eric: There's always been things like that. I think the key is always you just have to be relentlessly focused on still moving the business itself forward. And so, I think whether it's in the context of Visa or COVID or anything else, I think one of the things we've always really been very focused on is ruthlessly focusing on making sure that we're serving our customers, we're serving the ecosystem, we're continuing to move the ball forward irregardless of what happens on something like that. And so, there's a couple of tactical ways in which I think we did that. I think one is just in terms of how we speak to the company. We're very clear that this is just one potential milestone among many. It is not the end goal, it is not the finish line. I think that's particularly important even if you see companies now going public and so forth, I think. I learned a lot there from my days at Square where that's kind of how Sarah and Jack talked about the IPL, right? It wasn't the finish line, it was just another milestone amongst many milestones. And I think if you take that attitude, it's easier to remain focused. The second is the way you think about the team. And I think we've always tried to minimize the number of folks that are truly actively working on something like that. In the case of COVID, obviously that's a little bit different. That affects everybody. But in the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small. And everyone else was 100% focused on continuing to grow the business. They were certainly aware of the transaction and aware of what was happening and obviously how could you not be given some of the press at the time. But fundamentally, they were 100% focused on their day job on, again, serving our customers, serving consumers, building the platform and the ecosystem.

Brett: Do you think it's mainly sort of a comms kind of a thing where you're just relentlessly landing those messages? So, is it just narrative and storytelling and keeping people focused in the way that you communicate or are there other things that you have to do?

Eric: I mean, I think it's substantive as well, right? I mean, in this case, I don't know if I would think of it as kind of falling apart. I mean, certainly the deal didn't go through, but then subsequently we raised at a significant upround. We provided liquidity to our team, right? And so, suddenly from an employee's perspective, you're actually pretty happy about it, right? And so, I think that went a long way to show the intent for what we're trying to build. I think it's about just the culture and what you really value at the end of the day, right? And I think if you build a company around any given milestone, like an acquisition or an IPO or something like that, I think it's really hard to build a truly great company versus if you build a company and a culture focused on actually delivering for your customers, delivering for in our case, the ecosystem that we're building, I genuinely think our teams, certainly I do, believe in that, right? And we believe in that much more than we believe in any one of these kind of externalities that might happen. And I think as a result, it makes it easier to stay focused, right? So, it doesn't just start when that event happens. It's like you're constantly talking about what you're trying to do for the ecosystem as a whole and for your customers and so forth and so on. And so, it's not like it's a new thing versus I think to me, sometimes if you frame it more as a comms thing, it sounds a little bit more like it was reactive to just that moment versus no, this was always the culture that we were building, it never changed, right? And I think the really great companies, they've been able to do that. They've been able to maintain that focus, to maintain that culture over a very long period of time, irregardless of what happens. And I think that's what then builds the resiliency to handle all the ups and downs that you talked about. It's very rare that you find a company where it's really just straight up into the right.

Brett: So, if you pick that apart a little bit and you talk about building the foundational culture that to the point that you're making becomes that ballast through all the ups and downs of the company's life, how do you think about what it actually means to create or construct or build that? The idea of being customer-centric, all the underpinnings that drive the culture. If you pick it apart and you use the least generic culturey language, how do you actually go about doing it in your eyes?

Eric: So, I think the first step is always, this is obvious, but you actually have to take the time to think about it and formalize it in a way. I don't think it's something you just want to leave to chance. And I think there's a lot to be said for, again, I think the founders like Zach and others, I think he was very deliberate about the kind of culture that he wanted to build. And I've seen a lot of founders that they're not. It's just kind of an afterthought. It's kind of the result of everything else that's happening around them versus like, no, this is like I'm proactively thinking about what I want it to be and what I'm aiming for. I think once you have that, I think the second piece is you have to hire for. And so, you have to be willing to make actual trade-offs in terms of the kinds of people that you're bringing on board, particularly in leadership positions, but really across the entire organization. And then I think you have to build out a rewards infrastructure around that as well. So, it has to matter for who gets promoted, who doesn't, who gets a raise, who doesn't, who gets more equity, who doesn't. Those things have to be tied not just purely to results, but to an individual's ability to enhance and further and contribute to the culture as well.

Brett: What have you found have been the trickiest moments around culture or when it has been the most tested in your eyes?

Eric: I think the hardest is always when there's a clear kind of conflict between the culture and some short-term goal. And so, where you believe in the culture long-term, you know what's right, but in the short term, there's a shortcut that would clearly maybe lead to better metrics or a better operational outcome. That becomes very challenging. And I think that's where again, I think the really good leaders, they are able to maintain that discipline, maintain that focus on that long-term north star vis-a-vis letting themselves, like I said earlier, to get distracted and say, "No, no, look, I know I can get to this one specific milestone. It's just a little bit quicker if I just make a few compromises." I don't think that ever ends there, right? Once you go down that path and the folks around you see that, there's going to be a second time, there's going to be a third time, there's going to be a fourth time. And before you know it, those cultural principles don't really stand for much of anything anymore. It's pretty clear that the short-term has overtaken the long-term.

Brett: What about things like you have a star employee in some dimension, but they're an asshole or they violate your culture in some way, but they're really high performing. Do you find there are those tension points quite often or very rarely?

Eric: I mean, those happen, right? I think they're the key is you just have to be very open, honest, and direct. So, you just have to take that on right away. And I certainly think that's a conversation I've had with a lot of folks over the years. And I think the key there is always to make sure that you're really discerning intent, right? So, that there's a version of the world where you might be acting in what I or our culture perceives to be an asshole, but you're not actually doing it on purpose, right? And so, it's simply me coming to you and saying, "Hey, look, this is really being perceived as you being an asshole. Maybe if you tried it a little bit differently, we would get to a much better outcome together." Once you say that to people, the vast majority of people I've ever worked with, their reaction to this is say, "Hey, Eric, thank you. I really appreciate you caring about me enough to give me that feedback." And then they do their best to course correct. And it might not be instantaneous, but over a period of time they evolve in terms of how they interact with their team and the rest of the organization and that solves. And somebody that was supposed to be an asshole two years ago suddenly is just crushing it from a culture perspective.

Brett: Switching gears a little bit, because you've been at the company for a long time, you've seen it go from a relatively small company to a relatively large company or certainly a larger company. The natural thing that happens when you add more and more people and you grow is you end up with more bureaucratic organizations. But in almost always cases, there's some form of slowness that's introduced into a company. What are some of your observations about that and the organism that is the company as it's evolved?

Eric: I think there's a few things. So, one, I think generally speaking, I do think it's true that the bigger you get, the harder it gets. But at the same time, the bigger you get, the more assets you have at your disposal to fight that off in a way. And so, I think there's a few core things that I think mine and we do. I think one is making sure that even as you get bigger, you're always crystal clear on who the decision maker actually is. I think you don't want to live in a world where it's unclear, you have five, six, seven people. They all think they're the ones ultimately making the final decisions. And so, I think even on something as mundane as just going through my leadership meetings or going through any meetings, just being crystal clear at the end, what are the things we're actually going to go do? But also then crucially, who's on point to do it and trying our best to make sure that it is one person, it's not two people, it's not three people, it's not four people. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be collaboration. That doesn't mean you're not going to go to your colleagues and ask them for input. But I think we try very, very hard to make it clear who's ultimately making the call. I also think we've tried to avoid just unnecessary layers. It's funny to me sometimes now reading what people are saying in the context of AI and so forth because I think-

Brett: The flattening of the org and everything.

Eric: Yeah. We built Plaid that way from day one, right? And so, we never really hired a lot of middle managers, so to speak, right? The focus was really always on hiring as many frontline folks as we need that are either building products, developing products, working with our customers, et cetera, or we needed the right kind of senior leadership to bring the right subject matter expertise in. But even for those folks, we have an expectation that they can still do their job, right? They can still do the job of an IC, right? And so, that's just culturally where we're at. And I think again, Zach is a wonderful example of a founder who actually does that, right? He really still does IC level work every single day. And I think he expects that of his leadership team and then we expect that of the rest of the team as well.

Brett: Do you think about driving pace and velocity in the context of what you're responsible for and that you're kind of a governing force on that or no?

Eric: I do, but I think there's other dimensions to it as well, right? And so, there's a dimension of speed and velocity. There's a dimension of risk and then there's probably a dimension of cost and you're trying to optimize in that kind of three-dimensional space, so to speak. I don't think it's fair to say that, "Hey, no matter what the decision is or what you're talking about in the context of the business, that faster is always better." I think that's nonsense, right? There's plenty of examples where you don't want to do that, particularly I think in a business like ours where the details really matter, right? I think one of the examples I oftentimes give folks is in our world, if I tell you there's $101 in your bank account, but it's really $101.10, there's absolutely nothing funny about that. It's not like it's like you're buying gems in a video game or something like my kids do on their iPad. And if they get that wrong by a little bit, is it great? No. Is the world going to go on? Yes. But if you fundamentally as a consumer or as one of our customers can't rely on the data that they're using to make very important recommendations and decisions. This decides should you get a mortgage? If so, how big of a mortgage should you get? These are life-changing decisions for you and your family. We have an obligation to make that as absolutely right as we possibly can. And if that means that in certain times, in certain pockets, we move a little bit less fast, so be it, right? That's just one example. And then oftentimes, there's a cost dimension to it as well where it's just a question of how much money are you willing to spend to make it go faster? And so, sometimes that trade-off doesn't make sense.

Brett: Do you talk about that in the context of whatever you're working on as a team or an org? We are going to go slow here or we are going to go fast here?

Eric: I don't know that I would frame it as we go slow. That's not the branding that I think is going to resonate with folks.

Brett: Well, we need to be methodical and precise here.

Eric: Exactly, right? I think I would frame it more as, look, this is one area where we just absolutely cannot afford to get it wrong, right? And so, that by definition means you're going to have to make some sacrifices when it comes to speed. And so, it's just understanding for any given area across those three dimensions, where do we actually want to play? And so, we talk about it in that context, right? And so, it's a trade-off. Again, you can't have everything. There's no way that's not how the world works. And so, it's about being honest upfront about the trade-offs that you're making when it comes to this specific decision, this specific project, this specific part of the business, and then executing accordingly. That's the way I would think about it. And that can evolve over time, right? It can evolve as the technology and our capabilities evolve. It can evolve as regulation evolves. It can evolve as the competitive settings of other solutions that are out there in the market evolve. So, these things aren't static either, but it's being clear about what they are when you set out. And it's about having the discipline to go back and reevaluate and look at does that trade-off still make sense? If it does, fantastic. If it doesn't, you need to change it to get it in line with what the current market and opportunity actually demand.

Brett: Do you find that you often as a team think this is a time we need to be methodical and actually you rethink it and actually we should err towards speed? Or the easiest thing is figuring out that set of trade-offs. And then the hard thing is going and actioning on that.

Eric: For better or worse, I think Zach and I have a fantastic partnership there where he tends to be the one that's coming in and saying we should move faster. And then the German in me is a bit more methodical about it. And so, that's a good tension at the end of the day to make sure that we're actually executing on it in a sustainable way. And I think it's a part of why I think we've been so successful. I think we've had competitors that sacrificed everything at the altar of speed and it didn't work out and not at all. And so, again, it's about being smart. And so, are there moments where even I find, yeah, we should be going faster? Absolutely. At doesn't happen. But I think we have a lot of folks across the business that probably tend to be more aggressive on the speed side than I naturally am. But it ends up being a really, really good balance to make sure that we're actually getting to the sweet spot for what the situation demands.

Brett: Maybe you could share a little bit about how you've thought about organizing the company over the company's life. I don't know if there's certain chapters you would break it apart into. How would you articulate your higher level thinking on how to organize a company? There's so many ways. And you're also multi-product company now. You have different types of customers, two-person companies, 200,000 person companies, different sectors. What are the different incarnations of org design and what have you landed on now and maybe what are some of the things you've gotten right or wrong?

Eric: I'll talk about it more through the go-to-market lens. Although on the product lens, it's kind of evolved in similar ways. And so, in the early days, there was only one flavor. And so, it didn't matter. An opportunity would come in, it would get assigned to an AE, and it would get worked. But there was no notion of it, this is a startup or this is an enterprise customer or anything like that. And I think in the very early days, that's actually workable. And I think the general principle there is you want to avoid unnecessary complexity, right? And so, it's so much when you're first getting started is about finding the right kind of product market fit within the right segment within the right use case. You can still afford to find true generalists and your products are probably simpler or at least more narrow. You're unlikely to start with 15 different products at the same time. You're starting with one thing. And so, here in the case of Plaid, that was mainly off, which is just the account and writing number. It's what customers use to be able to initially connect the bank account to then fund it. That's in and of itself not that difficult to explain to somebody. And it doesn't really matter that much of whether you're talking to an enterprise customer or you're talking to-

Brett: The unit of value they want is very similar.

Eric: Yeah, it's very similar, right? And so, that's where we started. And then we very quickly realized as we got bigger and bigger, "Hey, there's actually a real difference now in terms of how big companies are buying our products from how small companies are buying them." And so, then we had T-shirt sized it, small, medium, large. We called it something else, but conceptually, that's what it was. And then there, that's at the time that I came in.

Brett: Was that intuitive, that shift? What were the signs that it was the time to do it and it wasn't too early and it wasn't too late if you just had to orient?

Eric: You really started seeing a divergence in needs from those customers, right? And so, we had gone from one product to three products. The newer products were fundamentally different in terms of how they were being sold. And yet all three T-shirt size segments, our startup segment, our mid-market segment, our enterprise segments were all rapidly grown. Then it's, I think, relatively easy to go down that path of specializing. I think that also-

Brett: But you're starting to hear different things from the customers.

Eric: Very different things.

Brett: And that's what the decision.

Eric: Yeah. And it's in all facets, right? It's like, what do you expect from the product? What do you expect from the sales team? What do you expect from the account management team? What do you expect from your support team? What do you expect from your solutions engineering or sales engineering team? It starts diverging quite a bit, which is intuitive. If you've ever tried to get any of these things implemented, how we implement even today with the largest companies in the world to how we implement with a startup is very, very, very different. And so, if we're implementing a solution, pick a company like Citibank. Or on the one hand, we're implementing a solution with a startup that just got going that has two people working for it who are really technical. It's just a totally different process. And so, we started specializing along those dimensions. And at the time, at least we were still very functionally driven and the functions were separate. So, you had a sales team, you had an account management team, you had a customer support team. And I think one of the things that very quickly became clear to me was those handoffs between sales and account management, they weren't working very well. And I think I've been blessed to have a role at Plaid where I've always generally been able to oversee all aspects of the business. So, everything from marketing to sales, to account management, to support, et cetera. And so, I think it was much easier for me to put myself then in the customer's shoes and say, "Well, if I was interacting with Plaid, how would I really want this interaction to go?" Right? And so, certainly personally, I've gone through this as a consumer of many products where I call into one person, I tell them my life story, then they eventually connect me to another person or they go away and a new person comes in and then I have to repeat my life story again. Then I have to repeat it again and again and again. And honestly, by the fourth time I'm like, "I've had enough of this. Okay. I'm done here. How can you not know this stuff by now," right? And there's a technological solution to that to at least partially, but there's also, I think, an organizational structural solution. So, one thing that we did is we then created our segments, but then we put all the functions within the segment together so that the person leading the segment owned the entire end-to-end customer relationship, right? And so, suddenly, even if it wasn't the exact same person doing it, you had somebody much closer to the customer who was accountable for making sure that the customer's experience with our sales team smoothly translated into the customer's experience with our account management team, smoothly translated into the experience with our support team and so forth and so on. And that just dramatically improved both customer satisfaction overall, their ability to implement and scale their initial product and use case, and then our ability to successfully cross-sell and upsell them into all these other solutions that we had available.

Brett: What are the downsides of organizing that way?

Eric: There's an element of you lose some fungibility. And so, you just have less generalists, you're starting to go down a more specialized path. So, it becomes either more expensive or more important for you to be able to have a well-grounded understanding of how your business is going to evolve. Otherwise, if you hire too many startup folks and then it ends up being your business actually grows much faster in enterprise, now you're mismatched. It's hard to take the startup folks and just now turn them into enterprise folks. In many cases, frankly, vice versa. So, even if it moves in the other direction, you've got a mismatch there. And so, you need to understand your business better. You need to be more though about how you get ahead of that. Because in many of these cases, our teams can get up to speed quickly, but it still takes a few months to get them up to speed. And so, if you're not careful, you can really create a dissonance there. We just don't have the capacity to meet the needs of your customer in a particular segment. Versus if you take a more generalized approach, again, it won't be as good, but it's just more fungible across. It's easier to move them from one part of the business to the other.

Brett: What else can you share about how the org has evolved in the last handful of years?

Eric: So, it was that we kind of evolved from one size fits all to size-based. And then the next step for us was just really adding verticals to that. And so, this is within enterprise, whether you're in healthcare or in automotive or whether you're in real estate or whatever, that buying is also different. And so, we added another layer of specialization to that. And so, for us, obviously, FinTech is an important segment, banking and wealth is an important segment. And so, we really actually created segments that were being run as segments where that shared expertise really started to come to bear. And that probably started three, four years ago. And now suddenly instead of having somebody who's yes, only focused on big customers, but it could be any flavor of big customer, now it's one specific flavor of big customer where they're getting the experience of being able to do that over and over and over again. And that was really, really helpful. And then the final step now has been with the proliferation of products that we've brought to market successfully, right? So, it's no longer just aggregation. It's what we're doing on credit, it's what we're doing on fraud, it's what we're doing on payments. In every single one of those cases, we've really both intelligence layer on top of the Plaid network. We have amazing customers that are already operating at scale that's seeing massive benefits. We've now built horizontal teams that then help support our vertical teams, right? And so, the key there is if you're an enterprise customer in the real estate space, you want to be treated like an enterprise customer in the real estate space. So, you want one person that can speak to you about everything to do with Plaid. But at the same time, you still need expertise when you want to help on fraud versus if you want help on payments versus if you want help on credit and so forth and so on. And so, the way we structure that is if you're on the vertical, you own it, you're kind of the quarterback, and there's an expectation that you understand every use case, call it the 80%. But where you need to, you have a team of experts that sit horizontally that bring that last mile of product.

Brett: When you think about some of these org decisions, what do you think you did too soon or too late? And maybe it's just you have the benefit of hindsight, but when you look back at some of these architectural decisions, are there things that if you could have a mulligan and do it over again?

Eric: I mean, look, I could probably use a thousand mulligans. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where you look backwards and you just nailed it. I think anybody that tells you that they haven't thought enough about the journey that they've been on, even if it's been successful. Look, I think there's definitely pockets where we should have specialized more and faster. I think there's other areas where we probably went too quick. We were really still in a zero to one phase. We didn't need a whole team of people trying to sell that product. What we really needed is a few select relationships with very specific customers to help us co-create and co-develop. And then once we knew we had that product market fit for that particular combination of vertical and use case, then you start ramping it up. And so, I've made both mistakes, frankly, in either direction. I think the key for us has been to just build the organization in a way that it's resilient enough, it's flexible enough, and it has enough spare capacity. That's the last one. Something I really believe in is like, "Hey, I really don't ever want to be right at 100% capacity. I'm willing to pay for some inefficiency so that as the market evolves, as our product evolves, et cetera, I have the capacity to adjust to it in real time much more quickly than I otherwise could." And I think that's worked wonders, right? Because really allowed us to do is more recently now, we've had hundreds of AI companies signing up and we just announced OpenAI, we announced Perplexity, we announced Replit. And so, all these things I think are possible because we saw that opportunity about developing maybe 18 months ago and we were very quickly able to marshal folks towards that across product engineering design and go-to-market. And that was only possible because we had spare capacity, right? If we had dedicated all those folks at 100% to all these other opportunities where we were already seeing huge demand from customers and growing, I don't know that we would've been able to react as quickly to what has been obviously a huge opportunity for us in addition to be able to grow what we already had.

Brett: Something you didn't talk as much about is how product and engineering fits into the org design. And I would assume it gets infinitely more complicated when you have many segments in terms of verticals, many company sizes, and then many products and you're trying to build a roadmap and this customer wants this and that customer wants this. What's been the high level path of product and edge as it relates to org design?

Eric: I mean there we have what we call product areas. And so, product area dedicated to payments, product area dedicated to fraud, product area dedicated to credit. And so, they're the ones driving that roadmap for that kind of specific area. And in part it's those solutions are aimed at even different buyers at the same customer. And so, I think the key then, like you said, is, okay, for any given customer, what do they really want across that whole spectrum to the extent that they want to buy all of those products? And generally, I think we've been able to manage that quite well where I think we've just made the decision for credit with an eye towards how do we build the best possible credit solutions for the ecosystem? We've made the decisions on fraud with an eye towards how can we build the best possible fraud solutions for the ecosystem? I think it's been very rare that customers have essentially said, look, I'm not going to buy your credit solution until you also build this specific feature on fraud. Even though from our perspective, that feature would be further down the list. It just truly very rarely happens.

Brett: But what about the fraud offering for a 10-person company versus a million person company?

Eric: That is, I think, fundamentally a decision for our fraud team. I partner with them, our teams partner with them from a sales and from a sales and marketing go-to-market perspective. But at the end of the day, that's literally the work of our product managers on fraud is to understand the overall market enough to say, "Okay, well, where do we think relative to alternatives we can build the best possible solutions?" If anything, the only other lens for us that's important is where does it help us grow the network? Because at the end of the day, we're really a network of networks, right? And so, fundamentally, there are pockets where having a new consumer sign up for Plaid benefits all of our products and solutions. Having a new account connected to the ecosystem benefits all of our products and solutions. So, there's a bit of a bias there to say, "Not just what makes me the most money, but it's first and foremost about what allows us to build the network because it's the network that then delivers a better outcome for consumers. It delivers out better outcome for our developers, delivers a better outcome for the ecosystem as a whole." And so, you think about that in a very specific use case. If it's you as a consumer wanting to get a mortgage and you want to do that in an easy way where you can easily cross shop different opportunities, it's very important for us to A, obviously have a relationship with you. But then also if you have 10 accounts that are relevant to have all 10 of those accounts ideally already connected to Plaid, so that that becomes a very seamless process versus having to go through and connecting each account one at a time. Now that's gotten a lot faster for us as well, but that's obviously more cumbersome than just like, "Hey, I already have them all connected. Let me share it." You can literally instantaneously get the offers that you're looking for. You're happy as a consumer. The developer's happy because it's a really tight match between your needs and their product. And the ecosystem as a whole is improved because it's just a much more efficient way of matching your demand with the right supply.

Brett: What about pre and post-sales and making that as smooth as possible? Do you have traditional account management in each one of these segments?

Eric: Yeah. And I think my general philosophy over years has always been both for support and I think account management, engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, et cetera. It's always been always available never needed is the ideal mantra, right? So, I'm a big believer in, and I think we've been really focused on building our products to such a level of quality that they could theoretically be self-serve and oftentimes are, right? And so, one of the things you see a lot of is you see even very big customers, companies implement with Plaid and scale to massive use cases without ever having to talk to anybody. That's incredible. And so, we don't hide a customer's ability to contact us or anything like that. We want to make it easy while at the same time making the product so good that that just doesn't happen as often. And then a customer can choose and they can choose to engage with us whenever they want to. And then obviously, we're monitoring the health of their integrations, the health of their product, the health of their use case. And where we think we have something to add to meaningfully make it better, then we proactively reach out there to help them. And so, if you on your own aren't quite getting to the place that we think you should be either in terms of how quickly you're moving through the process or in terms of the results that you're seeing, we'll proactively engage to help you with that.

Brett: What about the expand motion where you're getting people to go multi-product with you? Is that also pretty low touch, no touch?

Eric: Again, I think it depends on the phase and the kind of customer and the specific use case. I think generally there, the first thing for us is just awareness, right? I think we're lucky that we have a lot of really amazing customers. We're lucky that a lot of those customers are obviously incredibly satisfied. They've been with us for a very long time. They have really great NRR, et cetera. But I think there's still pockets, particularly with a lot of the intelligence solutions that we've more recently brought to market where even some of our existing customers are yet aware of them, right? And so, that's not true in core aggregation. I think if you think about in the US building a product where it depends on bank connectivity or open finance connectivity, the odds are just insanely high that you're going to consider Plaid. I mean, it's like a fireable offense. If you have to go explain to your bos that you made a purchase decision in this space and you just never considered us and it doesn't go incredibly well, good luck with that. That's not going to land well. I think our job is to make sure that when you think about payments, when you think about fraud, when you think about credit, we end up in that same place. And I think first and foremost, that just starts with awareness because once a customer has the awareness, then they obviously connect that with the experience that they currently have on Plaid, which is generally going to be very, very good. And now they're like, "Okay, well, let me learn more." And then we give them the path to either do that on their own or once again, they can engage with one of our teams. Like I said earlier, whoever owns that relationship can bring in more expertise from some of our horizontal teams where they're needed. And then we have a whole engine on the backend in terms of account managers, implementation teams, solutions engineering teams, et cetera, that will help you implement the solution and then scale it.

Brett: But do you ever think about so much of what you're doing from a product and engineering perspective is you want to deliver on the promise for the customer with very little human intervention. And so, if the account manager never existed, maybe they have no impact on a given customer. Do you think about disambiguating just what the steady state of a customer is going to do without this account management intervention?

Eric: Do I think about it? Yes. Do I think that there's enough there to throttle it or to in any way not be there when they ask for help? Absolutely not. And so, again, we run a business that at scale is an incredible business. And so, the last thing I would want to do is you as a customer had a great experience with our first product. You have an issue with a second product and somehow there's just no help to be had. I think that's crazy. I think given the product work that we've done over the years, I think we've proven time and time again that we're going from strength to strength to strength. And you're seeing, again, not just the NR, but also the number of products that our customers are using continue to take up. And so, you just think about even if you got that wrong one time, how much potential future relationship value and even just hard LTV you're giving up makes no sense whatsoever. There's almost no amount of money that I wouldn't reasonably spend to make sure that one of our customers gets to a good outcome. And even if that makes that account unprofitable, that experience will kind of resonate across the rest of the ecosystem and you'll make it back on other use cases.

Brett: But what are the other ways if someone were to look at how you run your org, that sort of obsession expresses itself? That sort of, I'm going to go to the ends of the earth for the customer. Many times it sounds like you're not going to be penny-wise, pound foolish. Are there other points or the way that you've oriented the org that sort of flow from that sort of way of thinking about things?

Eric: Well, so I think first off, it's not just the customer, it's also consumers, right? So, I think it's really important for us that consumers, even though they never pay us, that at the end of the day, consumers get a consistently better outcome. And certainly that I think has been true in a massive, massive, massive way at the ecosystem level.

Eric: But for the vast majority of people, the reality is this allows people to make better decisions for themselves, better decisions for their families, better decisions for their small business, and it allows them to get better products for their needs at a lower cost. That is fantastic, right? And that's the north star. And I think if you do that through this relationship with developers where you leave no stone unturned to make their experience as good as you could possibly make it, there's just so much value created in that ecosystem that there's always going to be enough leftover for us. Always has been, right? And so, I understand the question, but I think in practice, we have never really been forced into a situation where we had to choose between, well, we don't have enough money to invest to give you this amazing experience. It's there. And again, I think that's a testament to how good our products are. It's a testament to how easy it is to implement and scale them essentially already. And so, we can afford to make sure that if something isn't the way it ought to be, that we can fix that as quickly and as reliably as possible.

Brett: At this point in your journey with the company and the scale of the company, what is excellence in your role as COO?

Eric: I'd say there's a few vectors to it. I think the first one is it's actually not Plaid. It's like, is the ecosystem overall creating more value for consumers than before? I really think about that quite a bit. And so, are people writ large better off because of the tools that we brought into the world? Our payment solution making it easier and cheaper and better to buy the things that you want to buy when you want to buy them, how you want to buy them? Or our fraud solutions eliminating fraud that otherwise would harm the ecosystem, et cetera. I think that's one.

Brett: Do you think about measuring that in any level of precision or it's just a visceral feel or gut feel?

Eric: I mean, we do a lot of work to try to measure that. And I think, like I said, there's a lot of really tangible things that we can share. You look up around, okay, well, what's happened to over limit fees? What's happened to trading fees? What's happened to average APRs and so forth adjusted for obviously base level interest rates, et cetera. And you can see all those things improving. And the reality is that just even what seem to be relatively minor improvements are massive, right? I mean, if I told you, look, it's like for this type of population, it went from prime plus seven to prime plus six and a half, you just put billions of dollars back into people's pockets. And I think that's a fundamentally good thing for everybody involved, right? I think the institutions agree with that. I think policymakers and regulators agree with that. I think our customers certainly agree with that and for us, it's an important component of it. And so, I think that's the first piece. Because I think if you don't do that, then you're just trying to extract rents. You're trying to get people to do things that actually aren't in their best interest. I don't think it's mission aligned with the kind of company that we are and that we want to build. And so, that's number one. I think two then is, okay, look, are we getting our fair share of that value, right? We've put all this work in, we've built all these amazing solutions. And I think that's generally measured both in just usage. Is a network growing, but also revenue. I think the third is what kind of team am I building, right? Is it the kind of organization where if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, all kinds of bad things start happening? Or is the reality if I do get hit by a bus tomorrow, well, my kids will be sad, my wife will be sad, and hopefully Zach will be a little bit sad. The world will go on for consumers, for our customers, for Plaid because of the team and the infrastructure and the tools and everything else that we've built, right? And I think I take great pride in the idea that I feel like if I left tomorrow, I think Plaid will be just fine. And I think too often you find situations where that's actually not the case. And in some ways to me, that's the ultimate asset test of did you do a good job or not? And my own lived experience is every time I've thought I've made myself useless and obsolete, there's always been some new opportunity that even at the company that I'm at that came up where we're like, "Actually, we could use your skillset to make yourself useless and redundant in this particular role as well, and you just roll it forward." But those are probably the three things, right? There's like, "Hey, what are we doing at the ecosystem level? Are we really growing the network and the business itself? And then are you building a team and a structure and an engine that makes all of this repeatable and consistent even without you there?"

Brett: But do you think in that case that you're trying to build an org so that if you weren't there navigating Chase or what you're doing with OpenAI or whoever, that the company would be perfectly well off without you? Or is there these certain pockets of basically jobs to be done that sit in your remit and if you were gone, you'd actually have to go get somebody else that could do it?

Eric: You probably would have to get somebody else. It's also not about me. It's anybody in a role like this. You probably shouldn't be in it if you can't add some value at the point of attack. It's just the point of attack ends up evolving. I think it's more maybe that. It's like if I found myself focused on the same point of attack for too long a period of time, my conclusion would be, well, I haven't really done a good enough job to build out the capabilities that we need to be able to do that in a sustainable long-term way. I can probably do it. And there's maybe even I would say maybe 20% of my job is just the stuff I really like to do, which I still didn't do, right? So, there's still certain customers that I go sell it myself because I love doing it. I probably don't need to, right? Keeps me sharp, right? It's fun. And so, I think that's another vector where at some point, if you've done it, like you said, as long as I have, even true for I think many founders, you deserve to take 20%. Have some candidates that you like it, right? You're good at it, you like it, do that. But then that 80% really is, "Okay, hey, where can I uniquely move the ball forward?" But the spirit there is always like, that's probably not a permanent thing. That's something where you need to backfill that with the actual structure to be able to make a decision.

Brett: Maybe on a similar thread, you hinted on this just a little while ago. In your role of CEO, how do you think about what is the IC work that you should be doing or you do to this day even with a large org?

Eric: I think it really changes. So, one part is 20% of it is like, hey, I just love doing this. And as long as nobody tells me I'm at it, I'm going to keep doing it.

Brett: And so, for you, you hinted at it, but that's things like-

Eric: Some of the big partnerships, some of the big deals, or some of the small ones that are very cutting edge, some of the early AI deals and so forth. I think that's just super fun. It allows me to learn new things. It allows to move faster because I can say yes to things and no to things very rapidly in a way that-

Brett: And so, you'll work the deal yourself?

Eric: Yes, basically. Yeah. I'm in there negotiating with the right folks. But it's unique. I've been there for so long. It's like other than Zach, there's probably nobody else at Blat that can say yes or no as quickly to certain things as I can. So, that's one. I think then it's what are the things that are important, right? So, think of the importance on one axis. There's an element of is this a one-way door? So, there's some things that are important, but look, if it goes wrong and you can hit rewind and there's things where, no, you can't fix it. It's just like this is the new paradigm, right? And then the third is just more subjective, but it's like how good is the talent that we have available internally to do this? And so, in certain pockets, we have just incredible people and they have the capacity. And so, then the default would be, even if it's important, even if it's a one-way street, I would start with delegating it first.

Brett: What about at what altitude you're flying in the org? Do you find in certain areas you go down to the IC that's responsible, maybe multiple layers deep versus most of the time you'll fly at a certain altitude? What about that question?

Eric: I think I've inadvertently scared quite a few folks who are new to Plaid and I will literally call them. I will just get there.

Brett: And they're not excited to hear from you?

Eric: And they're just like... the first time it happens-

Brett: They're not thinking this is a great reason that you're reaching out to tell you what a great job they're doing?

Eric: What is happening? And you can tell they realize I'm calling them and they're just like, "Wait, wait, what? What do you mean? Is everything okay?" It's like, "No, don't worry. I just have a couple questions." And you can almost hear them slacking their manager in the background. But I think that's a feature, right? I think Zach operates it away. I think all good founders, I think at the end of the day, if you allow yourselves to just be so far away from the point of attack, I think it's really hard to be good or great. I also think it's really hard to earn the respect of your teams. I think so many of those stories that will end up making the rounds of Plaid. And it's like, "Oh, Eric came in, he actually talked to me about it. He actually helped me. He actually joined the call and we got to a better outcome." And that's not why I do it, but I think it's a feature not a bug. So, sometimes it just happens. Sometimes there's just a lot of relationships that I've had over the years where we have a customer that I've literally worked with for eight years where I have the relationship with the founder or the CEO and the CPO and so forth and so on. And so, sometimes it's just easier for us to have that conversation. And again, I have the advantage of in those moments being able to say yes and no instantaneously. And that goes a long way. But the framing all tends to come back to those three dimensions. How important is it? Is it a one-way door or not? And then do we have the talent/the capacity internally for somebody to really nail it? And then I go from there. And when times are good, I have a lot of free time on my hands, which Zach's always like, "Hey, what are you doing?" But the reality is if you've built a really kick-ass team and they're doing a great job and they're on top of it in a role like mine, you actually do have that spare capacity again. But that is, to me, it's a feature Because if something goes wrong, it's not only that we have capacity at the organizational level. I have capacity and I don't have to take from something else. I can immediately lead the charge, whether that's a unique opportunity or a unique threat.

Brett: At the org level, this sort of idea of not redlining at all times so that you can go after emergent things that present itself. Have you found there are downsides? I find every decision there's positives and negatives. Is Slack in the system, are there things you have to manage around or can create lack of intensity or I don't know.

Eric: Look, I think you could make that argument. I mean, particularly with you, if you hear the whole, what is it? Every day, everyone's working 14 hours a day, whatever it is, seven days a week. The truth is, look, if you are so on top of it that you are perfect about how you're allocating your seven days a week, 14 hours a day, then that is better than what I'm describing. It's just flat out better, right? You're able to do more. You're never making mistakes, you're always doing the right thing. The problem becomes if you ever wrong, your ability to course correct and then your ability to quickly course correct because now you're going to get stuck at, well, what am I going to take from? That's the challenge. And so, I think more realistically, most businesses operate in a world where they do make mistakes and unforeseen opportunities and threats do come their way. In those moments, that spare capacity is an absolute godsend in terms of your ability to react and to tackle that. And that's no different than sports or anything else, right? If you play basketball and every minute of the game, you're going 100% redlined to where you just got absolutely nothing left. And then suddenly at the end of the game, you have to make a play. I don't like your odds, right? Versus if I was just a little bit smarter and a few times here and there, I just walked to the sideline instead of sprinting to the sideline, et cetera, and I've just got a little bit more energy left. This has nothing to do with how you practice leading up to it. It's like how you're playing the actual game. I think I'll win.

Brett: What about as the business evolves? How do you build your feel for the business? You sort of hinted on this a little bit, but I assume when you first join, the company's a much smaller, single product company. Your kind of feel for the business and the customer, what's going on comes very naturally. You might be all in one room or one floor plate or whatever. As the business expands, you start to look at dashboards, you have staff meetings, you have... But it's harder, I think, to have that feel. And I think that feel matters a lot because that drives your judgment and instinct. What have you noticed in that dimension?

Eric: I think you cannot get yourself separated from the point of attack. It's as simple as that. So, that means talking to ICs directly, talking to... And I go spend time with everyone. We hire somebody straight out of undergrad, starts with Vlad. I will go spend time with them a month in, two months in, just understanding-Yeah, what are we doing? What are you doing? What's working for you? That is all so valuable. It's not rocket science. I don't think it's particularly clever. It's just like, "Hey, go spend time with your team, go spend time with customers, go spend time with partners. Be at the front lines." And I think the more of my time I can spend on that and the less I spend it on strategy and internal stuff, I think the more effective I think I am and the more I think effective ultimately Plaid is. But I think that takes energy, it takes passion. You have to really care about what you're doing, your customers, the use cases. I think it's hard to do if you're working on a business where you don't care about the business, if that makes sense, right? And so, I think that's sometimes I see that where folks are joining companies where they don't really care about it, they just think it's going to do well financially. And then you find those executives have a very hard time motivating themselves day in and day out to be at the front lines. But that's not why they're doing it, right? It's not the reason. And so, for me, I really believe, like I said, in the products and solutions that we're bringing in the market and the ecosystem that we're trying to build and the benefit that consumers derive from it and our customers derive from. So, I love talking to them about, "Okay, well, how are you using our credit solutions? What are you even trying to solve in the place? Where do you think that's going? What would you want to see in the future that would put you in an even better position to serve your customers, our consumers overall even better?" And I just spend a lot of time on that. And so, yeah, I don't think there's anything hugely insightful there. It's just the discipline of being able to do that day in and day out I think is the trick. And I think a lot of-

Brett: But you have to be close to the front lines is the big takeaway.

Eric: But every day, right? Because it's not static. It's not like a thing you can do once a month like undercover boss for show and then you don't do it anymore. You're going to lose touch. There's just no two ways about it. Either you have to be incredibly disciplined about it, that'll work, or you just have to be really passionate about it, right? And probably ideally both. But that's the way to be in a situation where if you looked at my calendar, you probably wouldn't find many days, if any, where I'm not directly talking to customers or directly talking to somebody on the front lines of our teams. And so, that's the trick. I mean, it's almost like I talk to my kids. If you want to get good at something, the way to get good at it isn't to spend 10 hours one day. It's to spend half an hour or one hour every single day for 10 days or 20 days to develop it. And ultimately, those longer periods of time of shorter, more intense kind of interactions is what builds skill way more efficiently and to a much greater extent than if you just try to pack it all in.

Brett: Maybe on a similar line on your calendar, if you go back to what you were talking about, which is your core mandate, which you sort of outlined, I think is ecosystem health, business health and the people on the field. How does that map to actually how you spend a week?

Eric: I'd say I probably spend 25% of the time on ecosystem health, probably 50% of the time on business health. Again, working with customers and so forth, and then 25% on team. And on the team side, I think that varies. I've just been lucky that at this point I have an amazing leadership team. I think a lot of those folks have been with me for a very long period of time as well. And so, it's not like we just hired a fantastic CMO, for example, but that's the only role that was really left on my leadership team. So, I'm hiring one person a year kind of thing.

Brett: If you were to go a click deeper, what are some of the rituals or the way that you run your staff meeting? What are the touchstones of a week that's not just important things like I met with this customer or I had lunch with a skip level or that type of thing?

Eric: I get my leadership team together every Monday. And I think we very openly talk about... Actually, the first bullet point is what have you learned from a customer in the last week? Even there because I want my team to have the same thing. Let's talk about what's new. So, I benefit from hearing their stories. They benefit from hearing each other's, but we start there. We talk about what are just important things that people need to know. And then we talk about follow-ups and then we talk about actual new topics kind of decisions that we need to make. So, you have that. And then there's a whole host of cadence around, we'll look at our pipeline, look at our forecast, do a deal review. There's a whole host of things like that that are in that second category of running the business. And then the rest of it is really spent one-on-ones developing.

Brett: When you think about your direct reports underneath you, is there anything differential that you look for across every single person that's very important to you that's not just what most high-functioning COOs would want in their execs?

Eric: I don't know how unique it is, to be honest, right? I think for me, I really care that they believe and are aligned to the mission. So, back to I want folks that are going to have the passion about what we're doing to actually want to get on the front lines themselves and be at the point of attack. And I've just found over the years in every place I've been, that if you bring somebody in and they don't actually care about what you're doing, they're there because they think you're going to go public next or whatever else. I think it is just a matter of time. They can fake it for a certain period of time, but eventually that edge wears off and they end up not, I think, being as involved in the business as they could be and should be. And that ends up translating to a lack of performance.

Brett: How easy is that to figure out in an interview context? Because there's so much salesmanship that's going on.

Eric: Some simple things are just like, what other roles are you looking at and why? What connects all of them? And I think if you get an answer to that, that's like, "Well, I'm looking at this company over here in AI, and then I'm looking at this other kind of..." It's just all over the place. And the only thing that really reasonably would ever connect them is you read somewhere an article that says that they're doing well. The odds are that whatever they tell you next about their affinity for your product and solutions isn't quite as genuine as it is. Just the odds dictate that because otherwise, why would you be looking at 10 different things? And so, there's things like that and there's a lot that you can do through references by asking the right questions. And even just referencing in my world, I oftentimes will talk to people that they sold to. So, you worked for X, you're coming to join Plaid, but I know people that you sold to. I'll go call them. I'll be like, "Hey, what was your experience? Did you ever meet them?" And the number of times where you're the CRO or CEO and they're like, "I have no idea who that person even is." And so, there's a sampling bias there. I think for better or worse, if you called a lot of our top tier customers, you called the CEOs, et cetera, the folks that are working on that, I think a reasonably high percentage of them would know who I am.

Brett: What do you think when you think about all the people you've hired and all the people that haven't worked out or the small subset that haven't worked out? Is there a thread that ties it together?

Eric: I think it's two. I think one is what we just talked about, which is they never really fully bought into the culture and they didn't have the excitement for what we're trying to do. And then the second I, and we got enthralled by the expertise. And so, it's what I said earlier, so much of what we're building, it's new. It actually hasn't existed before. But I think there's pockets where you could talk yourself into thinking that, "Hey, this person actually has done it before." And in a world where you're constantly navigating a certain uncertainty, it's always very appealing to be like, "You know what? I'd love to have somebody on my team that is better than me at looking around corners because they've kind of done it before." And that can be at any level, right? It can be very specific on how do I build an enterprise sales team? It can be broader and so forth and so on. But I think if that's the main reason you hire someone, I think that oftentimes doesn't work out because you end up overlooking all these other things that are far more important in terms of what that person's feeling is. I was a consultant myself, so I don't mean this as a disc, but I think it's like they're more suited to be a good consultant for a short period of time to help you deliver levels-

Brett: And a business builder.

Eric: ... than somebody who's actually going to help you build the business. Because again, anybody that you put into that situation for the next 18 months is going to end up sounding just like that person at the end of that 18-month period, except now they have all these other amazing qualities that make them awesome. Versus this person, it's like if they don't have the rest, that advantage that you perceive when you first made the hire erodes actually over time because it gets replicated by whoever's in the role anyway.

Brett: What's been your observation as the difference between a very senior exec and a founder? Not just the role, obviously, the difference between a CEO and a COO, but is it there's some moral authority that comes with being a founder that's just different? Is it there's an inherent risk appetite and a willingness to bet the business that is different? Or do you think that people over rotate on what it is to be a founder versus a CEO or COO or?

Eric: Well, no, I definitely think there's a difference. I think it can cut both ways, right? I mean, I think there's founders for whom it's the first thing they ever did. They get to a certain threshold, but all their net worth is locked in the company. And suddenly, I don't think they're particularly risk-taking at all versus I might be coming in as an executive. I've had a lot of exits. I'm totally free to actually take much better risk. So, I don't think it's as simple as it's always good. I think sometimes, it can be bad. The good founders, I think the one thing that they have, which is impossible to replicate, is truly fundamentally their baby. And so, in the same way that, look, I love my kids in a certain way, you love your kids in a certain way. You will never love my kids the way you love your own and I will never love your kids the way... No matter how awesome they are, no matter how much time I spend with them, no matter how well-intentioned I am, it's almost impossible to do that, right? And so, Zach, I love Plaid, love the team, love the mission, love the company. I will never love it as much as Zach does, right? I may never even love it as much as William still does, right? That's a testament to them, but it's also just born out of the situation. If our roles were reversed, if I had started a company and then Zach was working there, I don't think Zach would love it as much as I did. It just allows you to do things that just become incredibly difficult to do over and over every single day if you don't have that. And I really think that it's a crazy analogy in a way, but I really do think what would you not do for your kids? And so, that I think is the number one thing. And the good founders, that's the mentality. And so, there's nothing that they're not willing to do.

Brett: Yeah. Well, I'm curious if you distill it down to that, what is the so what about that? If you want to take advantage of that or just the organic nature of the company, do... Takes advantage of it. What is it all about?

Eric: It gives you a level of resilience that nobody you ever hire is ever going to have.

Brett: Through all the ups and downs and twists and turns everything.

Eric: Through all the ups and downs, right? I think we're lucky it went well, but I think for most companies, they've gone through so many ups and downs and such significant downs that if you actually generally ask those founders, "Hey, if you were just a hired CEO, would you still be here?" And the answer would be no. I think one thing I hear a lot from my friends that have started companies, the one advice, my wife just started another company of her own. And the one thing you kind of tell her, and it's easy to say even in that relationship where she started is, look, there's kind of two outcomes that are great if you start a company, right? One is you retain control of it and it becomes huge. The second is it fails quickly. Everything in the middle, right?

Brett: Which is the most likely outcome.

Eric: It's like a terrible outcome in a way, right? But yet most companies go through phases where it sure as hell feels like you're in the middle. It's the founders that never quit. Zach never quit. There would've been a thousand reasons to quit along the way and he never quit. He never even thought about quitting. And so, he's the only person that could have made it through all those trials and tribulations to develop the skills that he now has because he's the only person that loved the thing enough to where none of that ever made him question for even a second whether or not it's worth it. And I think people innately see that in great founders and they deeply, deeply respect it. And so, because I believe that that's how he thinks about it, I afford him a level of, I don't know what you want to call it, respect, grace, whatever on anything. Because I believe fundamentally, he would never do anything that's bad for Plaid, that he believes to be bad for bad. So, there's just everyone else, myself included, I could make the argument that in pockets, maybe we would've done something that's more selfishly oriented to what I want versus what's best for Plaid. I have zero doubt that everything he's done, he might be wrong by the way. He might be wrong. But the fact that he puts that first and foremost goes a long way. And I think all the really, really great founders, they have that in common.

Brett: What about just wrapping up, if you think about yourself seven and a half years ago and you think about yourself today, what's the most different? What have you figured out? I'm sure there's a lot. As we're having this conversation, it seems like you're very driven by values and very align your own values to your values at work. I guess those things probably haven't changed very much in seven and a half years. But are there a few really important things if you were to compare your previous version of yourself to today that would be most striking?

Eric: I think that there's one thing that comes with perspective, age, whatever you want to call it. If you had told me, not even just seven years ago, right? But if you told me when I was 15, 16, growing up in Germany, I said this earlier, that my life would turn out this way, I'd be like, it's amazing, right? It's just a fantastic outcome. But at the same time, every single day, I'm like, "Oh, I could just be a little bit better or Plaid could be better." And so, it's trying to balance those two things. That's the challenge, right? And so, I think for most people that are out there that have been really successful that have helped build these kind of businesses, I think realistically for the vast majority of them, it's like, "Hey, look, this has gone way better than you ever had any reason to believe it would go or should go." But then the best ones are still have that fire to keep going. And in a weird way, I was talking to somebody about this the other day and I was like, I don't know whether I would wish that on my kids, right? In a way, you want your kids to just be like, look, I achieved this thing and I'm now super happy.

Brett: Very tiring.

Eric: And I don't know that I will ever feel that, right? I don't think there's ever going to be a day where I'm like, "Hey, mission accomplished." Because I think there's always something that we could do, again, in the context of Plaid, but I think in the context of any role I would take on, there's always something that we can do that's better for the consumers, better for the customers, better for the company, better for the people that put their trust in me to join my team, et cetera, better, better, better, better, better. And on the one hand, I love that. I wouldn't trade it for the world. But on the other, you have to be kind of crazy I think a bit to be that relentless about it no matter what.

Brett: Do you think it makes you less happy on a regular basis?

Eric: I don't know that it makes me less... Maybe in a way, right? But then there's so many other things in my life where I made very good choices, right? I think on this one, it's like sports is the same, right? It's like who are the people that end up being really good? It's not the people that won one championship and then we're like, wow, I never-

Brett: There's a dissatisfaction that goes along with that. I can always-

Eric: You have to be like-

Brett: It was a great game, but I could have done this, this and this.

Eric: Exactly. Yeah. I think Goku I work with at Square. I think he said this somewhere like this, perpetual dissatisfaction. That's in some ways the secret and that comes with a burden and so you shouldn't.

Brett: But so then what is the result of that on you as a COO? Meaning you compound that over seven and a half years. And I look at you seven and a half years ago and today every day trying to get a little bit better. Where is it most substantially expressed?

Eric: I think the biggest area is probably in how I try to show up for my team, right? I think that's where I've grown. I don't know that I've gotten that much better at selling to customers or doing some of the tactical things of the job, but I think how I show up for my team, how I try to put them in a position to succeed.

Brett: Share more. What does that look like?

Eric: I think that's where those folks would say I've come the furthest. I mean, it's the things we talked about. It's like, "Hey, how much time are we really spending for those folks that really need it? How far ahead are we thinking in terms of putting these folks in a position to succeed?" And we have so many people at Plaid that have internally shot through the ranks that have gone from IC roles to now running hundred million dollar businesses. And so, I could literally name seven or eight people on my team that have followed that path. And it's not like every single person always works out, but they've worked out to a phenomenal percentage. And they themselves are so much of the reason for why we've had the success that we've had. So, it's picking the right people, but then also then really being committed to investing in them and then giving them that confidence to say, "Hey, I'm not going to just turn around and take you out of the game if you miss one shot. That's not how this is going to go down, right? I genuinely believe in you, right? You can absolutely do this. I'm going to put the team around you to make you shine and then let's go." And I think if you stick with that for long enough, you're just going to be right a high percentage of the time that you're going to end up with these amazing outcomes," right? And they deserve really all the credit for that. But that again, there's lots of sports analogies in there where too oftentimes you'll see coaches yank a player after the first baby and then surprise, surprise, they're not going to be very-

Brett: And then everyone else.

Eric: Right? It's just never going to work. Or the next time even they get in, they're just panicked about doing the same thing that just got them yanked up the first time. And then they go to a different team and a different coach and that coach is like, "Hey, you got this. I'll leave you in. You make a couple mistakes." And then a quarter of the season in, they're suddenly killing it. I think you see that over and over and over again. And so, I think tied to that probably also is this notion of I just have very little FOMO. Once I make a decision that somebody is the person I'm going to invest in, I'm not that worried about what the other option is or the other option is or the other option is. I'm then dedicated to seeing it through, unless they give me some really clear reason for saying, "Hey, this just isn't going to work." And then obviously Plaid as a whole comes first, but the bar for that is pretty high.

Brett: To wrap up at some point when you're retired or you're not at Plaid or doing something else, what is it you want the people that you worked most closely to say about you?

Eric: I think one, that we really try to do our very best to serve consumers and our customers. I think that's really important to me. This notion that the work we did actually in many, many, many small ways in some medium ways and maybe even fewer big ways helped move things forward to be better. And so, by that I mean there's literally going to be millions and millions of consumers that will never know my name, but their life will just be a little bit better because of the products and solutions that we brought to market because of the ecosystem that we built. And that goes a long way. I think there's a lot of things you can do in life where at the end of the day, you look back and it didn't really leave much of a dent. And so, I think that's the first one. And then the second one is that I think the people that worked with me, but particularly I think the people that worked for me feel like they got as close to their full potential as they could have gotten to, right? I think that's the second one. It's not that they loved it every minute of every day or anything like that. It's just like if they really think back and they're like, "Hey, could I have gone somewhere else and achieved more?" And in their minds, the answer is no. It's like Eric and Plaid helped me get to a place that otherwise I would've gotten to. And I feel like I've always had folks like that in my life, whether it's folks like Michael Mankins at Bain or Francois at Square or AL at Blue Mine and now Zach and others at Square. I've always really, really been lucky. I mean at Plaid, I've always really been lucky that I've been surrounded by people like that where did I enjoy every single moment? No, right? But do I believe they helped me get as close to my full potential as I could have probably gotten to? Yeah, right? And I think that would mean a lot.

Brett: Beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for the time.

Eric: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Brett: I really appreciate it. That was wonderful.