CEOs You Should Know Adam Nash Daffy Long Interview Final Unbranded

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You know, one of the bestthings about Silicon Valley is that almost no
one is from Silicon Valley. Greatpeople come from all over the world to
build companies and technology here. Butit turns out I actually was born in
Silicon Valley and I grew up here. I built my career here in technology.
I previously served as the president andCEO of a company called wealth Front,

(00:20):
and I've held executive and technical rolesat companies you've probably heard of,
Apple, eBay, LinkedIn, Dropbox. In addition, I have a real
passion for personal finance. I serveas an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University.
I've taught a class there for thelast seven years called Personal Finance for Engineers.
It's a class I always wish theyoffered when I was there, and

(00:43):
now they let me teach. I'malso an active angel investor. I've invested
over one hundred and thirty different companies, some of which may I have heard
of, Companies like Firebase, whichwas sold to Google, open Door,
which went public a few years ago, and then of course notable private companies
like Sigma, Gusto, and awhole range of others. All right,
well, thanks for sharing all that, and of course we're here to talk

(01:04):
about Daffy. Now. What I'dlike to do and I love this part
of the series when we get totalk to entrepreneurs and leaders and CEOs is
about that idea. And obviously,as an entrepreneur, you've had lots of
ideas, You've created companies, you'vesold them. It's the American dream,
it's capitalism and it's rocking and rollingall the time. And it's such a

(01:25):
neat story about Daffy. So ifyou could for me and our listeners that
hiptus the idea of starting Daffy.You must have seen a hole in the
industry where there was something to befilled in and say, you know what,
I think we have an idea herethat we have something special that doesn't
exactly exist the way we wanted tofor our clients and the members out there,
can you talk about the origin?Please? Very happy to And the

(01:49):
story of Daffy really goes back tothe pandemic in twenty twenty, my co
founder Alejandro and I we're thinking aboutbuilding a category defining product in a space
that we thought would be really meaningful, and obviously during the pandemic, everyone
was thinking a lot about what wasgoing on in their communities and local needs.

(02:10):
And we saw that a lot ofpeople were giving and supporting charities and
nonprofits in their area, even thoughthe process was harder and more frustrating than
it had to be. I mean, I've had a long career in fintech,
both as an operator as an investor, and we've seen so much success
in the last ten to fifteen yearswith new companies and products that have helped

(02:32):
people spend better and save better andinvest better. And all Hondro and I
asked, where is all that greattechnology going forgiving? Right? Can we
make all those ways that we've discoveredto help people spend and save and invest
better? Can we apply that tohelping people give better? And So,
I mean, like a lot offinancial priorities in life, automation helps,

(02:55):
particularly with financial tasks. Right.If you set a goal for your retirement
and automate it, it makes iteasier to hit that goal. And we
just really fell in love with thatidea of doing something like that for charitable
giving, and so Daffy was born. We raised around and built the team
and spent our time launching what wethink is a category defining product. To
help people be more generous more oftenoutstanding. Well, if we can,

(03:20):
before we get into exactly what youdo, Adam, do you have a
mission statement that you can share withpeople. We do, And actually,
as I just mentioned, our missionat Daffy is quite big, but it's
very simple. Our product and platformexists to help people be more generous more
often. We believe that with theright combination of technology and design, we

(03:40):
can actually help people make giving ahabit and inspire them to give even more
to the causes and organizations that theysupport. I love that that's well said.
So let's do this. If youwere to give a thirty thousand foot
view to myself, our listeners andbasically tell us what you do. What
is it that you do in thecompany. What's Daffie do? Yeah,

(04:02):
Daffi is well, you know,true to my background as an engineer,
Daffy is a pretty straightforward name.It sounds like fun, but it really
stands for the donor advised fund foryou. You know, we believe that
everyone should have some money put asidefor charitable giving, and that's what DAFI
is. Daffie is a modern platformfor charitable giving that helps anyone open and

(04:25):
fund and support the organizations that theycare about. A donor advice fund,
of course, is a tax advantagedaccount where you can put money aside,
get a tax deduction for giving moneyto charity, one of the best tax
deductions out there, and then anytimeyou're inspired to give to an organization,
you just make a recommendation, afew taps in the app, and the

(04:46):
money gets sent to the charity thatyou support. In some ways, it's
similar to a four to one Kfor retirement or a five point twenty nine
plan for college savings. But itreally is an amazingly flexible platform to help
people put money aside for charity.And now the best part, of course
is that you don't only have theability to put cash aside. You can

(05:06):
actually donate stock, you can donatemutual funds, you can even donate crypto.
But anyway that people want to putmoney aside, they want to give
to charity, we try to makeit easier for them to do so with
a simple app in their pocket.And Adam, I don't have to tell
you this and you're just mentioning itbecause it's on the phone. That makes
it so easy to do, andit's so brilliant that way. I did

(05:28):
want to ask you this. I'ma sports guy. I've been in the
business for over thirty years, andI always love to ask professional athletes,
when did you know that you werereally good? Or when did you know
you were going to be a pro. So with this app and this idea,
which is freaking brilliant, when didyou and Alejandro know that you know
what? I think we have somethingpretty special here that could really work.

(05:53):
You know, there's there's a fewdifferent moments, but for me, I'm
always inspired by the members bye bye, people who actually are putting money aside,
who are actually supporting organizations. Iremember when we just launched the product.
One of our first donations, ourfirst contributions, was actually a member

(06:13):
in New York who wanted to supporttheir congregation, but they wanted to give
them a bitcoin. And of course, like most congregations, like most charities,
they don't know how to handle abitcoin. And this person had seen
our press release and said, oh, I get it, I download your
app, I give you the bitcoin, and you'll get cash to the charity.
And the fact is we didn't knowthat person, we never met them.

(06:35):
They were three thousand miles away.But that magic of realizing that,
Wow, by building this app,by using technology, we could make it
easier for this person thousands of milesacross the country to donate an asset which
granted as a novel asset relatively recentto bitcoin, and actually have that money

(06:55):
reached the charity that they cared about, all in a matter of days.
It made all a hand and Ifeel like we were really onto something that
this could really be a big partof helping people be more generous. Has
anything surprised you over the three anda half years since you came up with
the idea and co founded this company, because you know, as well as
I do, tech and the world'smoving very quickly. Has anything surprised you

(07:19):
in the sustainability of the growth ofthe company over the last three three and
a half years. You know,the biggest surprise to me continues to be
how little most people in the industryand the technology industry have focused on this
sector. I mean, let's behonest. In twenty twenty two, Americans
gave almost half a trillion dollars tocharity four hundred and ninety nine billion dollars.

(07:43):
I mean, that's almost two percentof GDP. By the way,
that is an extraordinary number. Itis extraordinary. It's a huge market.
And the estimate is that about sixtymillion American households give to charity every year.
By any measure, this is ahuge market. This is a lot
of value, and it deserves tohave the investment of top quality people and

(08:07):
engineering design working on this problem.Clearly, giving matters to people, and
I think, you know, thecraziest thing about Daffy is that we actually
believe that people want to give more. You know, our research shows that
when people set a goal for theirgiving, they actually end up giving thirty
two percent more to charity than justgiving when people ask them. And so

(08:31):
you know, we look at thatnumber and as big as five hundred billion
dollars a year sounds. We thinkthat if people actually were able to easily
give as much as they want togive when they want to give it,
they might give as much as onehundred billion dollars more a year to charity.
And that could be a trillion dollarsover the next decade. Wow.
So that's what gets us fired upand excited about what we're doing. And

(08:52):
I imagine without me having any contextor any research, A lot of it
would be just the ease of usingthe app I imagined to make it easier
for the client to do those things. Right. You know, you're right.
Technology has a huge role to play, and we all know that when
you have an easy to use appor service, you use it more often.
And so that sounds like a wonderfulthing for giving, right. If

(09:13):
you have this app in your pocketand you have money put aside for charity,
it's so much easier to respond toany request you get. But the
real benefit of a platform like Daffiis that it turns out that putting money
aside for any financial goal makes itmore likely that you'll hit that goal.
Right. We know this from retirement, right. You don't just save for

(09:35):
retirement one off writing one off checks, right, You want to set up
an automatic deduction from your paycheck.This is why for one case work,
and it's same for a lot offinancial goals. And it turns out the
research says it's the same forgiving.And so the biggest value I think of
having Daffy, having that app inyour pocket is that any time you're inspired

(09:56):
to give, the money's already beenput aside, so all you'd have to
do is make the decision to give. And so by making that decision easier
for people, we think that thatwill unlock a lot more giving. You
know, Adam, we talked aboutthis brilliant idea that yeah with Daffy,
and I imagine that when you dohave this great idea and you implement it,
that eventually there's going to be copiersor people that want to do what

(10:18):
you want to do, or theremight be some assemblance of competition where it
might be a little bit different thanwhat you're doing out there. With all
that said, how do you combatall of it when people want to do
what you do? When you've gotthis great idea, you've implemented it,
you're executing it, things are goingwell, but people want to they don't
want to rip you up, orthey want to copy and maybe do something
like you're doing. How do youdeal with those things? Yeah, it's

(10:39):
a great question. And we don'thave the luxury of being the first or
the only donor advice fund in thecountry. Actually, donor advice funds have
been around for decades and some ofthe largest financial institutions out there, I'm
talking the biggest banks brokerages like Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard all have donor advised

(11:01):
funds, But we differentiate ourselves intwo very big ways. One is,
of course, the technology that wetalk about, which enables us to implement
features that no one else has.Right. We have a family plan to
help support families who like to givetogether. We have a workplace plan.
We give the ability for people tosend charitable gifts, letting other people pick

(11:24):
what charity they want the money togo to and then have the money sent
off. We even let people runcampaigns and so we have a lot of
innovative features. But probably the biggestdifferentiator we have, which frankly is going
to be very difficult for the incumbentsand other large institutions to support, is
that we have a very different businessmodel, which we took from the nonprofit

(11:45):
industry. Most of these firms thathave donor advice funds, you know,
Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, theirinvestment shops, and they have a way
of charging for things. They tendto charge a percentage of assets, and
that has the problem that it makesthem mainly focused on large accounts. Right,
if you have a twenty five thousanddollars account at Van Garter Schwaber Fidelity.

(12:07):
You're going to pay one hundred andfifty dollars a year for that account,
and by the way, it's veryhard to even figure out what you're
paying. Daffy is based on amembership model like a lot of great nonprofits,
and our price starts at a verysimple three dollars a month. And
so we think that the combination oftechnology in our business model is going to

(12:28):
be a lot of differentiation in thismarket and really shake it up in ways
that hopefully help more people. GiveAdam, I did want to ask you
about the future. And I hadthe good fortune to live in Portland,
Oregon, where I knew a lotof people worked in Nike, and I
remember meeting somebody in a very specialplace and a very special ten person board

(12:48):
that thought about the future and thefuture only about what a shoe was going
to be like five ten years downthe road. I found that fascinating.
I didn't know it existed, butnow I know that every company, especially
a brilliant like yours, is alwayslook into the future, whether it's a
couple of years down the road,five or ten. So with all of
that said, with you and Alejandroand your team when you think about,
well, we're sustainable, things areworking now, here's the future and possible

(13:11):
growth. Where do you see thecompany going as you look down the road.
Well, it's a good question.It's always a little dangerous to ask
founders that question because founders are knownto dream big. And that's okay,
a great question. Yeah, andit's yeah, No, it's a it's
a it's a great one to ask, and I think it's an important one,
especially if you're joining a platform whereyou want to know what it's going

(13:33):
to grow up to be. Yeah, what are you signing up for?
For Alejandro and myself, we youknow, we started our careers. One
of the platforms we built together wasa company called LinkedIn, right, and
we were both small parts of avery big team there, but LinkedIn had
a vision of really connecting all ofthose companies and opportunities out there with the

(13:54):
talents out there. And when Ilook at the future of Daffy, what
I see is I see tens ofmillions of people across the country who care,
who give, who put money asideand donate to organizations and causes they
believe in. And I see acountry that has almost two million charitable organizations,

(14:15):
and there's no good way for thoseorganizations to find the people who care.
And there's no great way for thosemillions of people to find organizations that
inspire them, that do the workthat they want to see done. And
so the idea of building out thiscommunity where those millions of people can discover
and find those millions of organizations andvice versa is really exciting to Alejandra and

(14:37):
myself because it's something that doesn't existtoday. Right if you look on social
media, if you look online,it's all news, it's all finance,
it's dating, it's shopping. Butwhere's charity, where's giving? Building that
space online for charitable giving is whatgets us excited every day every week with

(14:58):
what we're building in the plottform behindDaffy. You know, one of the
exciting things of the world that Ilive in with sports and news is that
I'm on social media all the time, and to this day, Adam,
it still amazes me how things getviral, and I know there's really not
an answer to that. And soI throw this at you as an owner

(15:18):
of a company with this great idea, and you've been around for a handful
of years. You know, forme, when I get a great haircut,
I tell somebody you should check outthat barber. It's a great haircut.
It's word of mouth. In thisday and age, with this brilliant
idea and the app and what you'reexecuting now, you could buy all the
marketing you want and you can getthis platform. In that platform does simply

(15:41):
come down that somebody has a greatexperience. It's still word of mouth,
and that is the best thing thata company could ever have. Well,
word of mouth is definitely important,and I think that sometimes, especially in
the technology industry, people get sofascinated with metrics and virality and sure building
these different ways to spread the wordthat they can sometimes forget that the best

(16:03):
marketing and the best way for somethingto spread is for someone to use your
product, love it, and thenthey will tell other people. Right.
But I also think that the problemspace you work in, the problem you're
solving for customers, is also verymaterial to that. And one of the
things I love about giving is that, unlike most financial tasks, giving is

(16:26):
fundamentally social right. We don't shareour bank accounts with other people, and
investing tends to also be very privateand personal. But giving is something that
we do with other people. Right. We go to events, we support
organizations, we volunteer, we fundraisefor organizations we care about. And we
don't do that alone. We doit with others. And so you know,

(16:48):
Daffy has seen amazing growth. Rightin twenty twenty three, we saw
growth of over four hundred and twentyfive percent. We went from twenty million
in contributions to over one hundred andfive million dollars in just one year.
Wow. And a lot of growthhas to do with the fact that,
yes, I think the product iswonderful and differentiating, and yes, I

(17:10):
think that people who use the productsay, wow, this is such a
better way to give. I can'timagine going back to the way I did
it before. But a lot ofthe power and a lot of that growth,
a lot of that virality comes fromthe fact that people who give to
organizations and support organizations talk to eachother and they talk about the ways that

(17:30):
they give, and so we're seeingthe apps spread quite a bit through those
mechanisms. That makes a lot ofsense. I appreciate you sharing all that
we Adam, Let's do this.This is one of my favorite parts of
the interview. As we wrap up, I love to give the floor to
you, and we've had a greatdiscussion over the almost twenty minutes that we've
had a chance to visit. Butmaybe just a few takeaways for our listeners

(17:51):
as we wrap up the questions,the answers, your thoughts on Daffy,
and just a few things that youwould like to leave our listeners with when
it comes to your great company.So the floor is yours. W you
know. The advice I'm going togive is very simple, and it's a
personal story because I remember when Iopened my first donor advice fund and I

(18:11):
was amazed when I look back historicallyat how much it affected my giving and
how much more I support the organizationsand causes that I care about. And
so my advice for people would bevery simple. If you do give to
charity, whatever you give, whetherit's hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars,
whatever the amount, set a goalfor your giving, even if that

(18:33):
goal is just the amount you gavelast year. Use a platform like Daffy
to set some money aside. Makeit a part of your budget. Not
only will you find that it's easierto give, but the rewards you get
from giving get magnified over time becauseit is a bit addictive when you put
money aside for charity, when youwatch it grow because it's invested tax free,

(18:56):
and then when you're inspired you havethat money of itailable it feels good.
It feels good because you can supportthe organizations you care about, and
it feels good that you actually wereprepared that you put that money aside.
So I would encourage everyone, whetherit's Daffy or another donor advice fund,
to set a goal for their givingand make giving an actual part of your

(19:18):
financial life, well said Adam.And one last thing, website and where
people can download the app at OhFantastic yuess. So we do have a
native app. We were the firstdonor advice fund fully functional in the app
store. So if you go tothe app store and type in Daffy,
you'll find us Daffi Charitable Fund.You can also just go to Daffi dot

(19:38):
org and easily sign up within afew seconds. You can fund it with
a card, you can fund itwith your bank account, and like I
said, you can even do fancythings like donate stock or crypto. But
yeah, definitely go to daffi dotorg and check it out. I's standing,
Adam. I really enjoyed our conversationand really appreciate your time. Continue
to success to you and Alejandra andyour team, and thank you so much

(20:00):
for joining us on CEOs. Youshould know, thank you for having me