A Chat with Josh Schwarzapel, Early Web Entrepreneur & Fintech Executive (Sar Haribhakti)

Sar Haribhakti’s Substack conversation with Josh Schwarzapel, an early web entrepreneur and fintech executive.

Why it was kept

The passages Kyle kept: ambition and swagger as a draw for recruiting (Tesla, Amazon), recruiting aggressively at Kleiner Perkins, well-funded teams like Quibi, Color and Magic Leap failing anyway (stay lean), Bezos’s ‘be rigid on the vision, but flexible on the details’, the fintech winners focusing on down-market customers big banks overcharged, and an anti-pattern: lots of distribution models are working.

As Kyle captured it

• A chat with Josh Schwarzapel, early web entrepreneur & fintech executive Sar Haribhakti
  • The ambition and swagger we had as a team was a big draw. That’s why places like Tesla ($TSLA) or Amazon ($AMZN) can hire such an amazing team. There is serious ambition behind those projects. Hiring
  • We were SO aggressive at finding and recruiting the best people. We’d meet candidates over at Kleiner Perkins and walk them past John Doerr and Al Gore’s desk. We’d pitch multiple times before we ever interviewed. We moved really fast once we were at the offer stage. We’d get to know the candidate and their spouse, and made sure they felt like (a) the opportunity was huge and (b) the team really wanted them. It’s amazing to me how many big companies don’t do this well. They rely on inbound, and there’s very little selling that’s done up front or at the end of the process. Managers outsource all coordination to recruiters, and the process drags on forever. If you look at hiring like a sales process, you’ll completely change how you approach it. Hiring
  • You see this pattern ALL of the time. Quibi, Color, Magic Leap, you name it….they all had amazingly talented teams and all of the funding in the world, and it doesn’t matter. What’s worse, it’s always harder to pivot and maneuver once you have a large team and tons of funding.
    • Stay lean for as long as possible
  • Jeff Bezos saying: Be rigid on the vision, but flexible on the details. #Vision
  • Almost ALL of the mega-winners in fintech are focusing on down-market customer segments that big banks have traditionally overcharged. Chime, Robinhood, Dave, Earnin, Acorns, Digit, Affirm ($AFRM), AfterPay, Shopify ($SHOP), Gusto, Kabbage…all of them started by aiming down-market of their legacy counterparts.
  • An anti-pattern: LOTS of Distribution models are working.