How Divvy Reached 10,000 Customers and a $1.6B Valuation with Free Expense Management Software (Interview with Co-Founder Alex Bean)

Introduction and Scooter Business Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello everyone. My guest today is Alex Bean. He's sitting on a rocket ship with Divvy, but ten, eleven years ago he's selling scooter parts. What happened? We're gonna dive in today. Divvy 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 spend and flexible controls that prevent teams from ever going over budget. You can check it out at getdivvy.com.

00:21Alex, ready to take us to the top?

Alex Bean

00:23>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

00:24Just like scooter business.

Alex Bean

00:25>> Ready for the scooter part the scooter business reference, but I well, we

From Lucky Scooters to Fintech

Nathan Latka

00:28can dig into it. Well, it's crazy. I mean, you go I mean, my research team was looking at 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?

Alex Bean

00:39>> 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. I mean, I was in my mid twenties, knew the owner of the business, he got sick and he said, hey, I'm sick. Can you come in and run it? Like, you come in and and and build this thing? And, you know, at the time we were, we thought we were gonna like take

01:00>> over the X Games and take over skateboarding. So you kinda thought big, but we we did some fun stuff, learned a lot about manufacturing and and and branding, and he got healthy. So that's when we I gave it back to him and then and got into tech. So learned a lot, a lot of fun, but definitely different than fintech for sure.

How Divvy Would Have Helped the Scooter Business

Nathan Latka

01:16So so tell the Divvy, if you had Divvy when you were running that business, like what sort of credit lines would you have 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.

Alex Bean

01:27>> Yeah, but it's funny because you might say like, well how'd you go from selling scooter parts to doing Divvy? To me I'm actually it's super natural. Because you know, when I'm running Lucky, which was the scooter company, we had 10 riders all over the world traveling for various tournaments, know, building content. 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

01:51>> have like 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

02:15>> 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 companies.

Target Customer and Pricing Model

Nathan Latka

02:34Yep. And what's, who's the customer target today?

02:37Is it the luckies of the world, SMBs?

Alex Bean

02:38>> Yep. Luckies of the world, but just SMBs, you know, we kind of have two audiences I say, like one to fifty and fifty to 500. Slightly different use cases for the most part. But SMBs in general, that's what we're going after. The mom and pops of America, Main Street America, not just the VC backed companies.

Nathan Latka

02:55Yep. And and talk to me about that segment, right? So if an SMB is listening right now and they're going, man, I'm currently using like six tools to do all these things Alex is talking about and they wanna start with you. Like what's the average price point an SMB is gonna pay you guys?

Alex Bean

03:08>> Nothing. It's free.

Free Software and Interchange Revenue Model

Nathan Latka

03:09Okay. So how do you make money?

Alex Bean

03:11>> Yeah. So we basically take Amex, right? Like you're not paying for your Chase card or your 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 give you the software that Expensify and others 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

03:34>> like the source of information is so much quicker and so much better. The things we can do are much different. But yeah, it's free and that's why we're super excited to offer it to the mom and pops of the world. Because we can tell them, stop paying for those three softwares and come just use Divvy. And it's, you know, it's a win win for both.

Nathan Latka

03:52Yeah, mean you have four sort of thing, buckets that's 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. To be clear, want to make sure I'm getting this right. You're giving away spend management, expense management, and AP management free. You're making money on the credit card stuff and the credit fund.

Alex Bean

04:08>> Yep. Exactly right.

Funding the Free Model and Early Fundraising

Nathan Latka

04:09Yep. 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?

Alex Bean

04:18>> So that's actually a really good question. Had I've had that conversation with a lot of people. A few things. One, 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 in every, in all

04:40>> four of those buckets. So we're like, alright, 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. And at the beginning, 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

05:03>> lot of things that the banks couldn't offer us five years ago. That now they're they're fully built to offer to these Fintechs. So I think you're gonna see a wave of innovation because of that.

Nathan Latka

05:11So year one it sounds like was what? Like 2016, 2017, is that right?

Alex Bean

05:15>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

05:16And I wanna touch on Founding Story real quick because founder equity is always a hot topic with anyone launching a company. Do you guys just say, you know what? Equal partners fiftyfifty, or was there some nuance there?

Alex Bean

05:25>> Nuance, yeah. And I'm actually so here's let me give the every partnership's different, right? So like anything I give here is not gonna be definitive for all. So Blake, my partner, my friend and partner came to me with the concept of Divvy, right? And we formulated it together, but his original idea was his and the name Divvy came from him. And frankly, he had the money to to kinda help kick start some of this.

Nathan Latka

05:53How much did he kick start it with?

Alex Bean

05:57>> I think that's private. Sorry, I don't I don't know if we've disclosed that. I thought you know, it 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 formally. So

06:09>> 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 are partners and he I don't think he could have done it without me, but I know I couldn't have

06:28>> done it without him. And you can still be partners and not be fiftyfifty. 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 fiftyfifty. Great. That would be awesome. But for us it was not fifty fifty, but that doesn't take away from the partnership. Nuance First

Nathan Latka

06:50formal round was when and how much?

Alex Bean

06:53>> 10,000,000 from Pelion Partners here in Utah, and I think that was in,

07:00>> was it 18?

Nathan Latka

07:01Yeah. Okay.

Series D Raise and Valuation

Nathan Latka

07:03Yeah. You just raised more this year, I think. What was that, Yep.

Alex Bean

07:07>> Brought on Hanaco, Whale Rock, Crew, right? So some great investors. It was our series D.

Nathan Latka

07:13And how much did you guys raise there?

Alex Bean

07:15>> 165, I think.

Nathan Latka

07:17And do you remember the valuation?

Alex Bean

07:19>> 1.6. 1.6.

Nathan Latka

07:20So full story there. Don't wanna bury it.

Alex Bean

07:22>> You just as an entrepreneur, you're like, do you remember the valuation? I'm like, well, let me see here. Yeah. I remember the valuation. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:29Maybe I strategically ask it that way to make sure more people answer. 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 Expensify. We've had Brex on. We've had 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

07:45wanna dive more into the credit card business. I mean, much money can you make on the credit card business? There's only what? 200, 300 bits of spread there?

Alex Bean

07:52>> Yeah. Yep. That's correct. But there's a few different ways. Right? You see Brex is starting to launch paid software. We have some paid we have paid software. You know, you make money on the card, I'm sorry, on credit side, right? Fees and things of that nature. I mean, just like a bank. It's basically asking the question like, well, is Amex making money? It's like, well, I mean, I think they're making a fair amount of money. So,

08:17>> you know, two even 200 to 300 bips, you start to do the math and you're doing billions of dollars in spend and the revenue starts to add up.

GMV and Revenue Breakdown

Nathan Latka

08:24Is what will GMV be be this year through the platform?

Alex Bean

08:29>> Don't think that's disclosed, but, you know, we're we did we did oh, man. I don't think that's disclosed. I'm keep Can you do

Nathan Latka

08:37can you do a range, Alex?

Alex Bean

08:38>> Billions of dollars in spend.

Nathan Latka

08:40Okay. Got it. So more than a billion less than a 100,000,000,000. Is that a big enough range?

Alex Bean

08:44>> Sure. Yeah. That'll work. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:46That's a damn big range. Okay. More than 1,000,000,000 less than 10,000,000,000. And then, I guess, can you maybe just so can quickly understand this. So last twelve months, if you guys look at your total revenue, just give me percentages. What percent would you say is credit card versus paid software versus your credit fund returns?

Alex Bean

08:59>> Almost almost all. I would say majority of that is on interchange.

Nathan Latka

09:04Oh, wow. So really it's mostly credit card. Interesting. I was thinking you might have said that there's actually a massive balance sheet business here because you have unique insights to data you can underwrite better than anybody else.

Alex Bean

09:14>> Yeah, there's definitely elements of that, but even if you talk to Brex and Ramp, like you're not making most of your money on that, right? Because again, underwriting just minimizes your losses. It doesn't actually add you. If you're really good at underwriting, it doesn't add revenue, it minimizes your loss rate.

Nathan Latka

09:30Well, mean, so look, mean, are Kabbage, you know, Kabbage's of the world, that play in this space, right? Which it's a purely balance sheet business. You drive your cost to capital plus one or two, you have underwriting, you do deals, SMBs at a 35% effective APR, you make a big spread.

Alex Bean

09:43>> Yeah. So the difference on that, I think you'd see the same with Brex and Ramp too. Right now when we're underwriting, we're not doing a lot of loans. We will be, you know, adding to that. Kinda have that in beta. It's more underwriting like your credit card, like an Amex. So if you don't pay Oh. If you don't pay, then there are fees. And obviously there is revenue that comes from like, hey, if you don't pay

10:01>> your credit card bill, pay it late, you know, it's carried interest, etcetera. But Kabbage is doing like loans. Right? They're they're just straight out saying, hey, we're gonna give you a $100,000 loan and at this return.

Nathan Latka

10:12Got it. So just to be clear, you're just doing the credit cards. You don't actually you guys haven't went out and raised a billion dollars as a balance sheet credit fund to do small business loans into your partners.

Alex Bean

10:21>> Well, we we do have that set up. We are not fully launched on it simply from a product standpoint. We actually launched it pre COVID. We pulled it obviously with COVID. And now we're, you know, gonna start launching it again. So I mean, it's definitely in our wheelhouse, right? It's the same conversation Amex and all these guys have. So it's not maybe in the way we do it we feel like we'll have some innovation on it,

10:42>> the concept of those loans is not innovative.

Customer Count and Growth Rate

Nathan Latka

10:44Yep, yep. Talk to you about how many of these customers are serving now today. What's the number?

Alex Bean

10:48>> Yeah, over 10,000 and adding quite a few every month. So we're super excited about our growth rate and it just means that, I mean our motto is spend smarter. So for us, it's about having more and more SMBs, mom and pops, you know, build lucky scooter sized companies. Spend smarter, stay in budget, know, like hit payroll, save money. I mean, that that's kind of what we're all about. So for us seeing that number rise is exciting.

Nathan Latka

11:12Yeah. Your press release is 2019, a thousand customers, twenty twenty, 4,500. It's more than doubling year over year now that now breaking 10,000. What do you think you'll finish this year at? How many you adding new, like per month?

Alex Bean

11:23>> Yeah. I mean, think we'll easily top 20 and even with some growth pay on that. So we'll see, but we're growing over a 100%. So we we we expect that to continue.

Nathan Latka

11:34And that's customer count. Are you also growing revenues a 100% year over year?

Alex Bean

11:37>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:37How long can you keep doing that? I mean, it's hard to do that at big numbers.

Alex Bean

11:40>> Not forever.

Revenue Kept Private and the $100M Run-Rate Plan

Nathan Latka

11:41Yeah. Good. That's a good answer. That's a good answer. Can you give us a sense of revenue today?

Alex Bean

11:49>> No. Again, sorry. I don't want to be coy. I just think that right now it's private, so I'm gonna hold on to that. But no, mean, like we're super excited about it. We hit some some big milestones recently. You can look at our valuation and probably drive some element of what it is. So,

Nathan Latka

12:04no, but I haven't, I haven't done a series D round recently. Help us understand. Don't talk about your own deal, but in most series D rounds, how much of a company is a SaaS founder gonna be selling?

Alex Bean

12:16>> Yeah, I think, you know, if you're like, actually I'll give you this. So if you're gonna go public, now SPACs do make it a little bit different, but I think you see a lot of companies that go public and we would look at it and say, hey, you gotta be doing like 200,000,000 of revenue, you know, 300,000,000 of revenue to be like, to go public. Right? That's when you start to be a known name and and

12:39>> and really have traction. So for us, you know, in between that 100 to 300 range, like that's where we, you know, we look at that and say, okay, what are your growth rates? When do you hit what milestone? What do we need to do to accelerate out of this? And, and, you know, look at Qualtrics, which was a, they just went public here in Utah. They're they're friends of ours. And, you know, it's like, yeah, they

12:59>> hit the 200,000,000, then they hit the 300,000,000, then they hit the 600,000,000, and now they're approaching the billion. And it's like, you just have to keep that trajectory of growth. So I can't forecast, I'm not gonna announce our forecast of two years from now this podcast, but it's keeping a really healthy growth rate. It might not double forever clearly, because at some point that will stop.

Nathan Latka

13:20Yeah. I mean, do you think, do you guys feel good about your plan to break a $100,000,000 run rate in the next two years?

Alex Bean

13:26>> Yes.

13:29>> I feel very good about that. I'm very confident. Helps me yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:34Ahead. Make the statement.

Alex Bean

13:35>> No. I'm very confident that we will we will achieve that.

Nathan Latka

13:38Yeah. There you go. That helps me with a bunch of things. So you're it tells me you're not at a 100,000,000 yet. You're right. But the growth plan obviously clearly takes you over that mark. So that's great. Talk to me about any other Is there anything you talk about in terms of product? It sounds like you have a credit fund that's maybe in the works, you'll be more aggressive there. Any other products you can Yeah. Take

13:54it away

Product Roadmap and AP Management

Alex Bean

13:56>> So I mean, AP management, you see that as one of the four buckets. Reason we view that as so powerful is just, we want it to be one place that you're making all your spending and you're reconciling and you're thinking through like how much are we, you know, what's going out of the company. So we're, we've launched that, but it's not where we want it to be in terms of full scope and capability and the innovation

14:21>> we can bring to that side of the fence. So that's, that to me is what we're probably most excited about and coming around the corner.

Churn and Customer Retention

Nathan Latka

14:28Got it. That makes good sense. And then talk to me a little bit about churn, right, in this space. How do you even define churn? Because if you're not like a traditional SaaS company with a start and end date, do find churn is like they have a credit card and they stop using

Alex Bean

14:38>> the credit Yeah, basically. Okay. We so we're very like churn for us is very strong. We have launched Hold

Nathan Latka

14:47on strong or we so what's the what what are you churning like annually right now?

Alex Bean

14:51>> We we are not churning very much.

Nathan Latka

14:54We're Okay. Got

Alex Bean

14:55>> in a very good position when it comes to churn. And the reason is because By

Nathan Latka

14:58the way, I consider very good position like under 5% annually.

Alex Bean

15:00>> Is that fair to say?

15:01>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:02It's very Okay. So

Alex Bean

15:05>> which is crazy on a free product that people can walk away, right? Like, you know, you would assume a lot of people just sign up for free and they walk away.

Nathan Latka

15:11Well, an SMB. I mean, that's crazy looking Yep. For

Alex Bean

15:14>> But, but we're, why we're in a really good position is, is budgets, right? So if someone gets into Divvy and they set up virtual cards and they set up budgets set and up this new process, to go back to another way of doing it or an old way of doing it, they've gotta like go get their Amex card again. They then have to like set up Expensify, then they have to like bring everything, you know, together.

15:36>> And with Divvy, it's like once you have budgets and you're operating out of a budget mindset, which can be a little hard up front, but on the back end, like they're not leaving because it just has changed the way that they're they're running their finances. So, you know, and no one else is doing that yet. I know people are gonna copy us. I won't name one competitor, but we tend to see a lot of copy from

15:55>> from someone out there.

Competition with Brex and Market Innovation

Nathan Latka

15:57But I know who's who's the competitor?

Alex Bean

15:59>> No. I'm not gonna do it.

Nathan Latka

16:01What's the first letter?

16:03What's it rhyme with?

Alex Bean

16:05>> Let me put it this way. I'll I'll be honest. This is my honest opinion. People probably kill me. I don't know how many people are even listening to this. I have a lot of respect for what I see Brex do in the market. They bring a lot of their own innovation to the market and it's super super impressive. And so, you know, they challenge us and we challenge them and and and whatnot.

Nathan Latka

16:26Who's bigger?

Alex Bean

16:27>> Well, they just announced a large valuation. So I think it's fair to say that they are.

Nathan Latka

16:32Do you think they're doing more revenue than you or they're just good at driving a valuation?

Alex Bean

16:37>> I don't know their revenue for sure, but I'm fairly confident. I do know that I don't I think the gaps are smaller than people think. I think they are very good at driving a valuation, they're bigger. I think that, you know, it

Nathan Latka

16:50is very fair to say.

Alex Bean

16:51>> I I can't speak to their numbers and stuff. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:53Yeah, fair.

Alex Bean

16:53>> Look, Brex, like my thing is like Brex drove innovation on the credit side. And they deserve a lot of credit for it. We drove innovation on the software side and we deserve a lot of credit for it. Yeah. And that what my point is, you're gonna see the market, whether it's, whether it's the big companies like Chase, Wells Fargo, Amex, etcetera, or other startups copying suit. Budgets is one of those things that we've held to and,

17:18>> and we're super proud of, and it's super powerful for our customers. And I think you will see that be emulated in some form over over the next couple of years.

Nathan Latka

17:27Yep. Yep. Your friends at Qualtrics had this in the public markets in the SaaS world. Anything above like a 130, 140% net dollar retention is world class. It's hard to drive expansion revenue in the SMB cohort. What does your expansion look like over the last twelve months on the historical cohort?

Alex Bean

17:42>> Yeah. So again, not gonna disclose specific numbers. Here's the thing though. With with Divvy, because it's like, hey, someone will get it in and they'll start using us for the card software. But then they start using us for the AP management or then they start, you know, at some point they're gonna start using us for the loan management. So we actually feel like there's another five things we can add in that stack and five just being

18:02>> a, you know, kind of a figure.

Nathan Latka

18:03That's all mainly free though, right?

Alex Bean

18:06>> Yeah, but everything we launch has some, something that adds to the wheel, right? Whether it's direct revenue, whether it's future software revenue, whether, and let me give you an example. And I'm not gonna give you a price point, but AP management, right? So let's say it takes five days for your ACH check to get into your vendor's hands. Well, for a fee, for a premium fee, you can get it, we can give it to them in

18:28>> two days. Okay, cool. Right. And every single thing that we do has a flywheel effect. Okay, you wanna suck in your invoices into the system? Well, every invoice is a new vendor that we can talk to and say, do you

Nathan Latka

18:40wanna accept a virtual card?

Alex Bean

18:42>> Yep. Or do you still wanna accept the ACH? And there are ways for us to make money in that flywheel and get new customers. So even though something's free, I mean like the obvious one is look at Facebook, it's free. Well yeah, but clearly there's flywheels that are making a ton of money. We have a very similar one just on the business side.

Nathan Latka

18:58Fair. Can we say your net revenue retention is above 120% or 110%?

Alex Bean

19:05>> To be perfectly honest, I can't actually recall the number off the top of my head, so I'd have to go check.

Nathan Latka

19:10No problem. Last question that I want to dive into. So you're giving the software away free, but you find unique sort of almost like utility based ways to pull some margin out. You just gave a good example on the AP management side of things. I mean, how much right now can you guys make on average per SMB using the platform? Is it like $10,000 sort of a year or 1,000 a year or what?

Alex Bean

19:28>> Yeah. And again, I'm just I'd have to look at the number. It's it's thousands, right? It's really healthy. Meaning we feel really really good. The averages can change depending on, you know, is it the one to fifty, fifty to 500? Clearly if someone's a 100-person company spending a $100,000, you know there's 200 to 300 bips. So you can do the math, right? Like, now there's a lot that we have to account for though, right? What people

19:50>> don't forget is we are giving rewards back to our customers.

Nathan Latka

19:53Yeah, don't make the full 300 bips, do you? I mean imagine you're probably making like 70 bips or a 100 bips

Alex Bean

19:57>> Yeah. I mean, comes to us, but there's there's costs, right? There's risk, you know, you have to, you have to put money away for risk, you have to put money away for COGS, you have to put money away for paying it back to to the customer and rebate. So there's a lot of factors in there, but yes, there's still a very healthy business in which you can make a fair amount of money on a free product

20:14>> to an SMB. Yeah. Super attractive.

Secondaries and Founder Liquidity

Nathan Latka

20:16Alex, last thing I wanna touch on before we wrap up. A lot of founders, they don't understand the concept of secondaries, but I like it. It removes risk from the business, allows you to double down and go for a $10,000,000,000 sort of thing and build something bigger. How have you and your Blake thought about secondaries and even for your early employees? Have you guys done any was any above the 165,000,000 recent raise of the secondary?

Alex Bean

20:36>> Yeah. And again, don't wanna speak to specifics because there's always a lot of people involved and and whatnot. But I I will say as a whole, I think the secondaries, I agree with you. Secondaries done right can give motivation, which which allows, you know, early founders and early employees to to keep going as opposed to, you know, stop. Right? Because it's, it's easy to say, oh, I've been grinding away for however many years and I just

21:01>> need something out of it. Like, fine, press, press the button. But, you know, secondaries I think are really, really healthy if, if done correctly. Which is by the way, I don't know if everyone would agree with that statement in Silicon Valley. So, you know, I'd love to hear other people's opinions, but I do think it's healthy.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

21:19All right. Let's wrap up here with the famous five rapid fire. Number one favorite business book.

Alex Bean

21:24>> Actually, you know what? It's not my favorite of all time, but the John Iger book, found at least very entertaining, the one he wrote last year.

Nathan Latka

21:32Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Alex Bean

21:38>> I've been I'm like late to the party because I'm not on Twitter, but I've been following Naval more. And I know like, I I found a lot of what he says to be pretty interesting, so sure we'll go with him.

Nathan Latka

21:49Number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building Divvy?

Alex Bean

21:53>> Sorry. Say that again?

Nathan Latka

21:54Favorite online tool that you use to build the company.

Alex Bean

21:57>> So like favorite tool that we're using internally? Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

22:01Yep. Or personally, yeah. Okay.

Alex Bean

22:03>> I'm gonna give both. So I I I don't know how I would live without Slack. So Slack is clearly up there. Everyone's heard of it. But you know what I got to give a shout out to is OneNote.

Nathan Latka

22:14OneNote.

Alex Bean

22:15>> Very Like Evernote's super sexy. It's the Silicon Valley, but I'll Look, OneNote is a vastly superior product to Evernote and and what you can do with it. So I'll go with OneNote.

Nathan Latka

22:25Number four, Alex. How many you have a I think you said you have a three month or three year old. How many hours of sleep do get in these days?

Alex Bean

22:29>> I have four kids. Woah. Under under the age of 10. If it was just one three year old, I wouldn't be stressed. That would be quite easy, actually. But I have two girls and two boys, but I also have an amazing wife who helps obviously do a ton. So I'm getting adequate sleep, but yes, it's, you know, my my 10 year old was up till midnight midnight last night and I'm having to lie in bed with

22:51>> her and talk her through the whole thing. So there are some, you know, some nights where it's longer than others.

Nathan Latka

22:56Alex, how old are you? 36. Last question. Take us back sixteen years. What do you wish you knew when you were 20?

Alex Bean

23:06>> You've heard it, but I will I I just like I believe so strongly. Your twenties are meant to learn. Don't focus on the salary. Obviously salary is a matter of respect. Salary is what you're gonna what you valued at. I totally get that. But don't take jobs before the salary. Like take jobs that you're gonna learn what you need to learn to take the leaps and jumps that you want to ultimately do and make your money.

23:31>> And that might happen in your late twenties or in your thirties or forties. But please, when you're 20, find the right people in the right companies, work with them, and you will learn so much that the rest will be taken care of. Money will come.

Nathan Latka

23:43Guys, there we have it. Alex from getdivvy. They launched back in 2017, financed with their own personal capital, did a first formal round of about $10,000,000, crossed a thousand customers, SMBs mainly in 2019. Now over 10,000 customers with a clear path to break a $100,000,000 in ARR over the next two years. Most of their business, it's giveaway free software where they have multi billion dollar competitors in the AP management space, expense space, really to make all

24:03their money on those 300 bps on the credit combined they process currently between a billion and a 100,000,000,000. Nice big range there. Alex, thanks for taking us to the top.

Alex Bean

24:11>> Anytime. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

24:14One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

24:38central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition,

24:59a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign

25:20up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

25:39We gotta push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys' support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.