So I actually dropped out of high school
and I moved to the Bay area, and I lived in this place called the tenderloin, But I didn't really
give my parents a choice. My decision was, this is my passion.
This is the thing that drives me. It was actually more than a passion.
It was like a calling. I used to believe the smartest people,
they went to the best universities. They went to Harvard, they went
to Yale, they went to Stanford. That's actually not true. And oftentimes when we've hired those
people, we've actually been disappointed and we've been wrong. The right people that are thinking
about solving the right customer problems, operating at the right speed is what makes
companies grow and scale faster. My name is Samir Vasavada.
I'm co founder and CEO of Vise. So Vise does three things. We help advisors build
personalized portfolios. We help them manage those portfolios,
and then we help explain the portfolio We're technology enables
investment management at scale. So it's funny because I've looked back
to like a very young age. My like the drivers, like the things
that brought me fulfillment in life was always like building something
like I love to build. And then the iPhone had come out. I had seen Steve Jobs and I had
read his book by Walter Isaacson, and I had just been inspired by tech. And it's funny because I come
from a very traditional family. My parents were Indian immigrants.
We grew up in a relatively small town. The concept of being a builder,
of running a tech company was kind of a foreign concept, and the way I actually started with this was pretty interesting, pretty random. I had met my co-founder
at a summer program in eighth grade. My parents had sent us
to a summer program at northwestern, and we had met because our dorm rooms
were across the hall from each other. And when we finished the program,
we wondered to ourselves, we have all this time on our hands. School is not too difficult.
Let's let's make money. And apps at the time were really,
really hot. Every small business wanted an app
and we thought we could build those apps. So we learned how to program.
We built our first couple of apps, and then my co-founder got a research opportunity at a notable university
in artificial intelligence research. And we decided,
what if we use AI to automate those apps? What if you could type in your app idea into a platform and we could build you an iPhone app in 30s? And that was our first startup. It turned out to be too much
of a technical challenge at the time, suited for two 13-14 year olds. But one of the guys who was mentoring us
was a former investment banker, and he said, you guys know so much
about AI and machine learning now You should consult with large investment banks because large investment banks want to learn about AI and machine learning for investment decisions and efficiency decisions within their firms. So we started consulting with a lot of the
largest investment banks in the country, and we were charging a lot of money
500 to $1000 an hour, which was a great, great side income for that age. And as we were consulting
with a lot of these firms, we realized that the wealth and asset management space
is a really big part of revenues. For a lot of these institutions.
It was 50% of revenue for Morgan Stanley. But financial advisors
at these institutions, we had believed where money management gurus,
they were investment management experts, and they didn't necessarily have
the tools or technology to be successful with investment management. So we saw an opportunity. What if we build technology
to help automate the investment workflows for these large investment institutions? We built our first prototype at 15, and the goal was to sell it to big financial institutions. Now, we didn't know how hard
that would be at the time. And Jamie Dimon was speaking
at a Detroit Startup Week. There was a local school field trip,
and runic had gone down to to go see Jamie Dimon speak. And Jamie got off stage
and we rushed him on stage and we we asked Jamie, What JP Morgan be interested
in leveraging artificial intelligence to automate their investment workloads
for their financial advisors. And he basically said to us, no,
JP Morgan has lots of technology, lots of investment workflows. But you should look at
independent financial advisors, because what's happening is a lot
of advisors are leaving big institutions and they're going independent. And you guys could provide the tech,
the software to power them. So we discovered this massive market
of independent financial advisors. And Vise could be the first company
to really deliver this. So I actually dropped out of high school,
but I basically left high school after partially through 11th grade, and I moved
to the Bay area, and I lived in this place called the tenderloin, But like, I didn't really
give my parents a choice. My decision was this is my passion.
This is the thing that drives me. It was actually more than a passion.
It was like a calling. Oftentimes when people say
that there's you're taking on risk to follow your passion. You know, the actual risk you're taking
is is not doing that right, because you're taking the risk of,
am I going to be miserable in life if I don't actually follow my passion? I think it gets really challenging
to take risk. When you have a family and you have kids
and like you have obligations and responsibilities, and that's when most
people really regret not having taken risk earlier on in their lives. And when you're doing at a young age,
it's actually even more important because, like you have the time
and ability to take risk. I'm 16, 17, 18 years old. Now is the time in my life
where I should take the most risk because I have a safety net to fall back on. So the question is,
do I listen to my parents or do I not? And oftentimes you just
kind of listen to your gut. There are over 400,000 investment
advisors in the United States. Clients expect personalized portfolios
tailored to their needs, but instead are getting dumped into
generic buckets of mutual funds and ETFs. Vise AI is an artificial intelligence
platform tailored to investment advisors so they can automate
portfolio construction and management. When we started,
it was incredibly difficult. I had cold called cold,
emailed hundreds of investors between the ages of 16 and 19, and no one
would give us money while I was living in the Bay area, sleeping on floors. My co-founder actually decided to go
to U-Penn and do a year of college, which could have destroyed our business, but I actually moved onto Renick's dorm room floor and I said,
I'm not leaving until you drop out. And he said, okay, to drop out.
We need to raise a million bucks. His parents had said, if you want
to drop out or take a leave of absence, you need to raise $1 million. So we decided we're going to go out
and raise $1 million. We don't know who's going to give us
$1 million, but we set out to do it. And it's funny because we
cold called so many people. One of the people we'd cold called was Jim
Goetz, a very famous partner at Sequoia, and I found his number online somehow. And I'd called him and I'd said, Jim,
this is the business we're working on. But I was so nervous
the first time I hung up. And then I called him back
and he chewed me out on the phone for like ten minutes and said,
Sequoia is never going to fund you. And ironically, a couple of years later,
they funded us three times over. But when we were in this process,
we kept coming against all these road bumps and people just kept rejecting us. What are you kids going to be able to do
in the wealth management space? Go find a real job or come back to this. And we ended up meeting these two guys,
Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg who started a company called Flatiron Health. And they said, okay,
we'll be your first investors. Even if the thing goes to zero, it's okay.
We think you'll be successful. And they gave us our first 100 K and one, we could afford to feed our employees
because everyone was working on equity at that point in time. And two, it was enough momentum for us
to kind of get excited and keep going. And then we ended up meeting Founders Fund
and Founders Fund co-led a seed round and we raised $2 million,
which was pretty exciting at the time. And Rounick had dropped out,
moved to the Bay area, and we had started the company officially. The way I think about it is there's
just you have individual successes and you have individual failures,
and we've had lots and lots of failures, but you never learn from your successes. You always learn from your failures. So our goal is to have
as many failures as fast as possible. So before we had a launch ready product
for Vise, we had rebuilt the platform something like 5 to 7 times. So we'd gone from a full platform build
to like scratching it all and restarting. And I think my one big lesson
in this whole thing, there's a Reid Hoffman quote you should be
embarrassed about your first product. We were always embarrassed
about our product, but we never actually launched it. We just kept scrubbing it and restarting. If I had to redo it all over again,
I would have. I would have given it to users,
even though I was so desperately embarrassed about the product. Because you're going to learn, right? And even if something is imperfect,
a little bit more feedback will continue your iteration cycle
to keep learning, keep getting better. So a lot of my early days,
every day after school, I would sit in financial advisors offices
and I would just watch them use our product or watch them use other product. And then it builds a really strong mental
model and understanding of how do they think, how do they make decisions,
why do they make decisions? So a lot of my learnings came
from just simply watching them do the work or doing the work with them. And that best way to learn
is just to do so. YC has this quote always be talking
to your customers, and it couldn't be more true As you grow, the hard thing is, as you grow
and you become larger and larger, you have salespeople, you have product
managers, you have people that will talk to the customer on your behalf. And that's actually the wrong thing
to do as a CEO as a founder You want to always be
talking to your customers, whether you're a multi-billion dollar company
or you're a five person company, because the more time you spend with your
customers, the better your product gets. The better your story gets,
the better you get at sales. There is nothing more important
than talking to customers. Actually make it a key part of my week. How much time did I spend
talking to prospective customers or existing customers Because the amount of learnings you get
improve your business tenfold. There is a belief in Silicon Valley
that more people and more capital builds businesses faster,
and that's actually a fallacy. That's not true. The right people that are thinking
about solving the right customer problems, operating at the right speed, is what
makes companies grow and scale faster. And the problem when you have a lot
of employees, less work actually gets done because you have more people that are managing more problems that you're managing with more people. So we actually realize having less people
and the top performers would actually lead to better results. Because what you realize as a company
is that the top 20% of performers drive the top 80% of results, so why do you want the other 80%? You want only the top performers at the
company, and you want to make sure those top performers are properly incentivized,
structured properly, and they have the resources they need to be successful. I used to believe the smartest people,
they went to the best universities, they went to Harvard, they went to Yale,
they went to Stanford. That's actually not true. And oftentimes when we've hired those
people, we've actually been disappointed and we've been wrong. We wanted everyone to think
about being kind of the day zero, day one employees that were building,
that were solving problems. And what happened was Vise had
gone from a seed stage company to $1 billion company in 18 months. It was record fast timing. It was the youngest person in history
to have $1 billion company. And what happened was we started
to recruit a lot of the wrong people. We recruited people that were here
to to kind of get rich. They were mercenaries. They wanted to join Vise and expected it
to be a rocket ship, and expected them not to have to solve problems, when in reality
we were still an early stage startup and we needed to do a major shift. We had built the wrong culture,
we had hired the wrong people, and we had to make hard decisions
to let a lot of those people go, and to change the mental model internally to,
we're not a big company that's made it. We are a company that is figuring it out. That's going to win
because we are all problem solvers, we're all thinkers, and we're all hustling
to make it happen, just like we did in the early days of the company. The way to actually think about talent
and hiring the best talent is to think about, like a framework I call
SKQ, Skills, Knowledge and Qualities. Really focusing on qualities. Is this person willing to work
super duper hard? Are they someone who can learn?
Are they flexible? Are they open to taking feedback?
Are they driven? Are they motivated? At Vise, we have three core values burn the boats,
customer obsession, and 1% better every day. Number one,
we want people that are committed. They're all in on the mission. They're willing to go through any walls,
run through any walls, go through any challenges
to be successful in the business. They're truly kind of they have
this burn the boats mentality Two, 1% better every day. You're 1% better every day. You're far, far better
at the end of the year. And it's those little changes you make
every single day to constantly evolve. It's not about the big change. It's about the little changes and those
learnings compound and your organization compounds as a result of those learnings. And the last and probably one of the most
important values is customer obsession, making the customer truly embedded
as part of our entire organization. Everyone in every decision is thinking
about how is the customer impacted, how are we going to drive more value
to the customer, putting the customer ahead of everyone,
even if it comes out at a personal cost to to our company? I don't recommend starting
a company at a young age unless it is your true driving passion. I think a lot of people think, wow,
it's really cool to start a company and like it's the hot thing to be doing and
oftentimes you shouldn't do the hot thing. You should do the thing
that you're passionate about, that you're excited about. I think I've had times
where we were at the top of the world, and I was feeling kind of lonely and
misunderstood and just miserable, and I was like, feeding for scraps, basically. I would like go to the Whole Foods
and steal from the buffet because, I had no money and I needed food. And I think that was like some
of the hardest moments of my life. But it was also really important
because one, it built grit and two, it built this kind of sense of
drive and purpose that if I didn't figure it out, I was kind of screwed
and I had to figure it out. Like it was like a burn
the boats like mentality. But if you truly love it and it's
truly the thing that makes you happy, I would say it's a no brainer opportunity
to be a founder. It's a no brainer opportunity
to start a company, and you'll learn so much more in the
process about yourself, about the world. And it's important to know
that you're not alone. And that's just kind of
what entrepreneurial journey is like. And it's important to just constantly
realize that the next day is going to get better, and your job is just to move to
the next day and just get a little better. And as long as you don't quit, as long as
you don't give up like you will get there. I think my vision is to build
the world's largest asset manager, entirely powered by technology. How do we transform this legacy archaic
age old industry into the modern era? And I think that we have
a very great shot at doing that, and I think it's going to take a while,
but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. As long as you keep going,
you will eventually get there. Right?
So in many ways that is that is my vision.