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[Original air date, March 21, 2023] For this Christmas Eve episode, I revisit my 2023 interview with Adam Nash, Co-Founder and CEO of Daffy, a fintech platform that encourages charitable giving.
Giving to charity is a powerful way to create change; even a small contribution to the right cause can transform lives and it’s a chance to make a real difference. As the year comes to an end and you get a chance to reflect back, I encourage you to learn more about Daffy. Adam was nice enough to provide a $25 bonus for Fintech Leaders subscribers → sign-up today to get an extra $25 for charity when you join Daffy. Claim your $25 here!
Adam is also a fintech veteran and prolific angel investor, who has been on the boards of Shift and Acorns, and was previously CEO of Wealthfront. He previously held leadership roles at Dropbox, LinkedIn, eBay, and Apple.
In this episode, we discuss:
Lessons from the role of the CEO and why it’s the only role that truly understands how a company’s pieces are going to fit together
“The CEO really is the only one who has the responsibility to keep in their head how all the pieces are going to fit together and long-term result in building a company, a business, a product that the entire team can be proud of.”
Steve is not only the CEO of Daffy, but previously held the CEO role at Wealthfront. Over the years he’s learned that successful CEOs take ownership of good and bad outcomes and are ultimately responsible for the success of a company’s product. It’s a role where one is constantly dealing with present challenges, but also making strategic decisions for the future. He also stressed that it’s crucial for CEOs to bring a company’s pieces together to deliver a successful outcome. Interestingly, one of his biggest takeaways is the significance of people problems, and how important it is to build a strong team to address them. While product and strategy are crucial, building a successful business ultimately comes down to the people behind it.
Adam’s journey at Silicon Valley and what it was like to work with Steve Jobs at Next & Apple
“It was really interesting to see the way Steve [Jobs] behaved. A lot of people have commented on Steve's leadership and the differences when he was young doing Apple the first time and then when he came back, I think that the Next team had a lot to do with that journey of him… I'm probably in the same group of people who saw a very different leader in Steve, when he came back to Apple, mainly because he trusted so many of the folks that he worked with.”
Building the first fully functioning donor advised fund in the app store and how Daffy is helping people give more to charity
“There are 60 to 70 million households in the US every year who give to charity. It's almost half a trillion a year in the US. That's over 2% of GDP. I mean, agriculture is about 1% of GDP. It's amazing how big giving is, and yet there's no reinvention here, no great technology solution."
Daffy aims to democratize and modernize charitable giving in the US. The idea for the company, came about during the pandemic when Nash thought about the great financial products that added real value for consumers but had not been reinvented or reimagined, including the Donor-Advised Fund, a product typically reserved for the wealthy that helps control taxes and spread charitable giving.
Adam Nash and Alejandro Crosa wanted to build something that would help people donate to charity, in the same way apps like Wealthfront or Acorns help people save and invest. So they built an application that makes it easy for consumers to put money aside for charity so that when they want to give, they can. Daffy's product makes it easy to set a goal for giving and put money aside automatically, which actually results in users giving about 32% more than otherwise.
Why Adam remains excited and bullish on consumer-focused fintech businesses, the importance of building a great team… and a lot more!
“Like Reed Hoffman, I tend to believe that careers are mostly built on what you could call ‘tours of duty’, that people don't plan out their whole lives, but they make this decision for the next few years. What am I going to spend my professional life on? What's it going to do for me? What am I going to have to show for it afterwards?”
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