How Divvy CEO Blake Murray grew Divvy to $100M revenue and 10K customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is alex bean he's sitting on a rocket ship with divi but 10 11 years ago he's selling scooter parts what happened we're gonna dive in today divi modernizes finance for businesses by combining expense management software and smart corporate cards into a single platform finance leaders can now get real-time visibility into their company's spend and flexible controls that prevent teams from ever going over budget you can check it out at getdibby.com alex ready to take it to the top yeah scooter ready for the scooter part the scooter business reference but we can dig into it well it's crazy i mean you go i mean my research team was looking they're going wait this guy went from basically being a gm at a scooter place to running like one of the fastest growing fintech businesses today how the hell does this happen yeah so real quick on the scooter business i mean i actually feel like those are some of my most informative years or formative years um i mean i was in my mid-20s uh knew the owner of the business he got sick and he said hey i'm sick can you come in and run it like can you come in and and build this thing and you know at the time we were we thought we were going to like take over the x games and take over skateboarding so you kind of thought big but we did some fun stuff learned a lot about manufacturing and and branding and uh he got healthy so that's when we i gave it back to him and then and got into tech so um learned a lot a lot of fun but definitely different than fintech for sure so tell the division if you had divi when you were running that business like what sort of credit lines would you been pulling what sort of expense management would you have been doing like sort of explain the current product as as like how you would use it back then yeah but it's funny because you might say like well how did you go from selling scooter parts to doing divvy and and to me i'm actually it's super natural because you know when i'm running uh lucky which was the scooter company we had 10 riders all over the world traveling for various tournaments you know building content uh we would do trade shows and so i would send seven guys to vegas on a trade show conference and we're a small company we didn't have a ton of cash so spending the budget of 15 000 for the conference was like imperative like you can't go over but everyone was using their own card we were getting expense reports you know a month and a half late so we were going over without knowing we were going over and divvy would have solved that entirely we you know we could have said hey here's your budget had cash check credit everything inside of that expense reports from all the riders and all the employees would have come directly so honestly when we started divvy my partner blake and i it was just like well we've ran multiple businesses and we understand the needs and so we built it not as tech engineers but as business owners and saying we're building something that we would have wanted to use in our prior company yeah and what's who's the customer target today is it the luckies of the world smbs yeah yep luckies of the world but just smbs you know we we kind of have two audiences i say like one to fifty and fifty to five hundred slightly different use cases for the most part but smbs in general that that's we're going after the mom and pops of america main street america not just the bc backed companies yup and and talk to me about that segment right so if an smb is listing right now and they're going man i'm currently using like six tools to do all these things alex is talking about they want to start with you like what's the average price point an smb is going to pay you guys nothing it's free okay so how do you make money yeah so we basically take amex right like you're not paying for your chase card or wells fargo card or whatever we take your credit card that's how we make money so we make money just like the banks would and then we uh give you the software that expensify and others are are giving you so we really combine it into one platform and what we've found is by combining it it's not only just that it's free it's the like the source of information is so much quicker and so much better so the things we can do are much different um but yeah it's free and that's why we're super excited to offer to the mom and pops of the world because we can tell them stop paying for those three softwares and come just use divi and it's you know it's it's a it's a win-win for both yeah i mean you have four sort of thing buckets list on your website business credit spend management expense management and ap management there are multi-billion dollar companies competing in just one of those verticals just to be clear make sure everything's right you're giving away spend management expense management management free you're making money on the credit card stuff and the credit fund yup exactly right wow okay interesting so i guess the question i would have for you is this is not easy software to build how did you fund it in the early days so that you could give it away for free so that's actually a really good question had i've had that conversation a lot of people a few things one we all we raised money early because we knew that we were taking a big swing i don't think that's for everyone so i'm not like out there recommending to all entrepreneurs like go raise vc funds go raise as much as you can but for us as you've just said we're taking on trillion dollar markets and everyone in all four of those buckets so we're like all right like we've got we've gotta bring money to the table and go build the team so for us that's what we did um and at the beginning like nowadays in the fintech space if that's where you're at there's so many more tools that enable fintechs to go build companies that didn't exist five years ago which that sounds nuts but you know there's a lot of i can get into the nuances a lot of things that the banks couldn't offer us five years ago that now they're fully built to offer to these fintechs so i think you're going to see a wave of innovation because of that so year one it sounds like was what like 2016 2017 is that right yeah and i want to touch on founding story real quick because founder equity is obviously a hot topic with anyone launching a company do you guys just say you know what we're equal partners 50 50 or was there someone who wants there uh nuance yeah and and i i'm actually so here here's let me give the every partnership's different right so like anything i give here is not going to be definitive for all so blake my partner uh my friend and partner came to me with the concept of divvy right and and we formulated it together but his original idea uh was his and the name divvy came from him and frankly he had uh the money to to kind of help kick start some of this how much did he kick started with um i think that's private sorry i don't know if we've disclosed that but you know it was a decent amount of his own money to say hey we're gonna go design and engineer and do some stuff before we went and raised formulas so um he he had he has more than me right clearly it was you know he had it and the advice i would give a non-ceo co-founder is you have to understand where you where you sit for me i always knew blake was the quarterback and i was the running back to use a football reference meaning we were partners and he i don't think he could have done it without me but i know i couldn't have done it without him and uh you can still be partners and not be 50 50. uh i think i've seen a lot of partnerships where you go in and they are equal partners one might be the ceo but the other one they have the idea together and that's 50 50. great that would be awesome but for us it was not 50 50 but that doesn't take away from the partnership so nuance their first formal round was landon how much uh 10 million from paleon partners here in utah and i think that was in [Music] was it 18 20 yeah okay yeah you just raised more this year i think what was that right yep brought on hanako will rock uh crew right so some great investors was our series d and how much did you guys raise there 165 i think and do you remember the valuation 1.6 1.6 so full story there don't want to bury them you just as an entrepreneur you're like do you remember the evaluation i'm like well let me see here yeah i remember the valuation yeah maybe i strategically ask it that way to make sure more people answer uh if you phrase it that way you definitely get a higher response rate but i wanted to put that out there because again what you're doing here is very interesting right we've had david on from expense high we've had brexon we've had a ramp on the show right and they're doing they're basically building massive business on something that you're doing for free so i want to dive more into the credit card business i mean how much money can you make on the credit card business there's only about 200 300 bits to spread there yeah yep that's correct but uh there's a few different ways right you see brex uh is starting to launch paid software we have some paid so we have paid software um you know you make money on the on...