Zach Perret: Why ‘Founder Mode’ is the Most Dangerous Blog Post for Founders | E1215

I think it's gonna be one of the blog posts that is the most misused, and actually causes a lot of the worst behavior in startups for a long time. OKR is another one. OKRs were built for manufacturing. We don't manufacture software. I think that raising money is, like, a big waste of time, so we try to raise money as infrequently as we possibly can within Plaid. Angel investing, I think, is very distracting to founders.

Ready to go? Zach, I am so excited for this, dude. For me to do this in person is such a joy. Also the first time we've met in person, so thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the, the podcast and, uh, amazing how long you've been doing it, and how impressive all of the, uh, all the episodes are. And kudos to you as an amazing interviewer.

That is very, very kind of you. As I was saying, I, I did not start quite like this. (laughs) Um, I would love to start though, on a little bit like the re-founding moment, because Plaid has had many iterations over, you know, the years. And in the last two to three years, it would seem like there's been like, a re-founding latest chapter. Can you just take me to that and how that's evolved?

For those that, the, the, that aren't aware, um, in 2020, uh, we sent paperwork to sell the company to Visa. Intervening period, uh, the, the, the regulators in the US had investigated it to say that, uh, to kind of ask the question, was Visa a monopolist, and was this a kind of monopoly-creating transaction? And the amazing opportunity we had within the business was, we'd grown quite massively from 2020 to 2021. Uh, COVID had, had been a huge tailwind for us, and we had the opportunity to actually, uh, walk away at the end of that deal and, and so, uh, elected to do so. Um, but no, we started working on the new product expansions before that acquisition.

The rapid revenue growth, was there a time when you were like, "Oh, shit. We're growing fast again and we're locked into this acquisition."

I don't think that th- there was that specific question on my mind. Um, the question that was always on my mind was, are we undershooting the long-term opportunity by being part of another company? And for every founder that's ever thought about selling their company, like, that's the key question that, that they're probably asking themselves. I don't think that most people, like, immediately orient on value, you know, the dollar value of the acquisition. Like, sure, yeah, it reaches a threshold and, and the dollar value, like, starts to make sense. But I think when people really go through that agony around, um, uh, selling a company, it's much more about, like, am I creating the long-term impact? Am I fulfilling the mission? Am I, am I achieving the vision that I've set out? And for me, it was always about that. You know, making the decision to sell the company to Visa, um, that was, you know, o- one of, if not actually the hardest decision that I've ever made. Um, uh, uh, certainly, certainly in the Plaid context. And-