What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Nia Dragova, the founder of
Candor. Nia, how's it going? Hey, it's going well. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much
for inviting me. Yeah.
I'm a long time fan. Yeah. And vice versa. I think my buddy Julian
introduced us maybe like 10 or 11 months ago earlier this year. Yeah. And we were talking
about your company and building community. I don't know how helpful I was during that
call. I brought in actual good tips. But it's cool to actually have you on the podcast.
Why don't we tell listeners what Candor is? Because it's kind of changed since I talked
to you almost a year ago. So at Candor, we help tech employees at public
companies manage their equity. And what we do is essentially give you information, advice,
and resources to really understand what all of your options are. Very few people realize
that how we treat equity hasn't really changed much since the 80s and the 70s. But how many
people we pay in equity, well, that's really changed. Almost everybody gets it now. So
we're here to sort of close the gap and make those tools available to everyone and not
just to kind of select few historically that's been executives, but hopefully in the future
I'll be everyone. Yeah. Yeah. It's super cool because you guys
do a lot of stuff. I mean, like the main thing is basically my favorite business, help people
make more money, help employees make more from their equity, like who doesn't want to
make more money. But then if you go to your website, so it's Candor.co, C-A-N-D-O-R.co,
and you go into resources, you have all these other things. So we are just talking about
your newsletter, which we'll get into. I love your newsletter. I think it's my favorite
newsletter in tech. Then you've got like a salary negotiation guide. You have offer reviews.
You have all sorts of different things. Like you can go there and like literally say like,
oh, you know, I applied for a job at Facebook. Like it's just a competitive offer that they
gave me. What kind of other offers are people giving me, et cetera. So I've used this. Others
have used it. It's super useful. But your main thing is helping employees make more
money from their RSU's.
Yeah. I think there's such a big juxtaposition between people who traditionally have been
part of tech and people who just now are getting the door open to be part of tech and Candor
really exists to democratize information to everyone. If you don't know how much your
equity is worth or how to negotiate it or what to even do with it, because you might
be the first person in your whole family to ever work in tech or to ever have a college
degree or to ever be part of this community. If you don't have this information, you're
just, you know, 20 steps behind and you just want to make sure everyone's on equal ground.
Yeah. I think it's a very noble cause and it's, it's good to educate people so they
can advocate for themselves. I think there's a lot that's been said, especially in the
last five, five, six years, just about like salary negotiation and how people from in
particular, like underprivileged backgrounds or people who don't have, you know, like sort
of the connections of the family to teach them this kind of stuff. In many cases, like
women are just like a little bit less aggressive when it comes to negotiating and often just
don't get paid as much as their peers, even though they're doing just as good of work
because they come into this negotiation just with less information. And so I like the idea
of like teaching people and giving people the tools and sort of like, like you said,
democratizing this information about how to save money on taxes or how to negotiate well
or what like a typical offer looks like so that the average person can be as good as
like, you know, a higher exec and making sure they get paid what they deserve.
A lot of people also realize that this needs to happen super early in your career, right?
So like, we all agree at some point, you should be negotiating, right? But not a lot of people
think about how early that should happen. I was going to quote a study. I just sent
this for an article I'm writing. So Harvard did a study that's super interesting and basically
trails the careers of women from the time that they graduate all the way to the time
that they retire and it looks whether they negotiate or not and what their outcome was.
And essentially, if a woman doesn't negotiate at the time that she graduates, so her very,
very first job, on average, she'll like lose 7000 in the first year, in between 650,000
in a million over the course of her career, because when you compound that, it actually
adds up to a ton. When you think about like all the times you didn't negotiate for yourself,
even if you felt like the offer was fair, there's gonna be a ton you're missing out
of. And for me, that's really personal because I was one of those people growing up who had
like basically zero resources. And I came from, you know, a very, very, very poor background.
And so I always experienced myself as an outsider to a lot of these communities. And I relied
on other people's like kindness and grace to teach me and to mentor me. And I was lucky
that I got that but there's so many people who are not lucky and we should not rely on
luck to make equitable choices, right? So yeah, I really care about this on a personal
level.
Let's talk about your background a little bit. You grew up in Bulgaria. I grew up and
I was raised in Bulgaria, which is like a post stamp of a country. If you were talking
about size, it has the population of the whole country is like 7 million and declining very
fast. It's one of the fastest declining countries in the world. And so if you think about like,
I think Sam Francisco have 10 million people living here, it's less than the population
of the city. I grew up at a time of like intense turmoil. We were a communist country that
was turning to democracy. And I was growing up doing that transition. So my family experienced
a lot of scarcity and food insecurity. And just a lot of uncertainty about the future.
When you were a child, was it like obvious to you that like this was a unique period
to be growing up in Bulgaria? Like there was a lot of unrest? Or is it because I imagine
when you grow up somewhere, it's like, well, you're a kid, you don't really know any better.
That might just be like, yeah, this is just how life is.
The audience was no, I think we were very closed off because of communism. So there was no
like news coming in from outside of the country. You can only get the like national news, national
newspapers. And I grew up in a lot of fear. I was taught from a young age, like don't
ask anything about how the regime is doing or don't talk too much about it, because people
could disappear if you make a joke or if you say something wrong. And so I think I didn't
know it was not normal. I certainly knew some of the things my family was doing were not
normal. My family did not, you know, kind of half of my family is very communist and
the other half is not at all. So I grew up with the half that's not at all. And so because
they were not supportive of the regime, we got basically no food. And we had to make
our own food. So we made our own soap, we made our own cheese, we made our own yogurt,
and we like owned nothing. So my grandpa had like themed money and literally had like a
cow in the forest. And I'm not even like remotely joking, like we would walk like five, six
cows in the morning. Yeah, thin cow. That was two cows, those two cows and a pig, that we
had chicken. But they were in the forest on like land we didn't own because we were not
allowed as non supporters of the party to own land. And we would go like before dawn
and like after sunset so people wouldn't see, because they could report us and you know,
we literally could be detained. And we would milk cows and make products out of it. And
many of the other people in our neighborhood who had babies but didn't have any milk, we
would give that to them to make sure that the kids survived. So it was very tough growing
up but it taught me one thing and that was that money was very important. Like I had
a concept of money at a very, very young age. And knowing that inequity when it comes to
money was what was causing this. I had that concept at a very young age. So in a way,
like my whole life, I've been wanting to work on what I'm working now. The consequences
of my childhood essentially are from, you know, enormous inequity. I don't want that
to ever exist in the world.
Right. I was reading a study, I don't know when maybe a couple months ago about just
like entrepreneurship and like childhood poverty, childhood adversity. And there's a lot of
evidence to suggest that like people who go through additional hardships as children are
more likely to become entrepreneurs when they're older for a variety of reasons. So I think
in this particular study, they were studying like the great Chinese famine of like 1960
or whatever. And a lot of the kids who came out of that famine became basically migrant
entrepreneurs. They grew up, they moved to a different place and they started businesses.
And maybe, you know, as you're suggesting, like the reason for that is because when things
are so hard, you do become acutely aware of like very adult concepts, like money and survival
and kind of how entrepreneurship and how basically acquiring and trading resources works. You
know, when I was a kid, I was not thinking about, okay, the babies in my town need milk,
there's our cow, how am I going to provide this to them? You know, I didn't have to think
about any of that stuff because my childhood was pretty cushy. But with you, I mean, you're
a very formidable entrepreneur now. And you're literally a migrant entrepreneur, you now
live in the United States. I'm talking to you, you're in your San Francisco apartment
with your San Francisco background, doing it big.
For me, like my concept of doing it big is also just like really different. Like I feel
very fortunate to, you know, have so much support from the community and to have so
many people in tech, like really band behind candor. But my idea of doing it big has always
been like super simple. You know, my grandparents are like 92 and 94. So my idea of doing it
big is like giving them a good life. And knowing that like I'm able to do that, and I'm able
to sort of kind of close that circle they've been a part of for many generations now, just
feels really good. Like it feels really meaningful. A lot of times, these are invisible situations,
right? People in the US have very similar childhoods to what I did in Eastern Europe,
we just don't talk about it, we don't see it. And so there's a lot of work we have to
do that's invisible to most people to get this to not be a thing. And I think it's a
cautionary tale to grow up that way. I don't know if it makes you a better or worse entrepreneur.
I think it definitely just makes you aware of your humanity and of your fragility as
a human. And it gives you appreciation of very basic things that, you know, they're
not connected to money, like things like love and integrity and honesty that you can't buy,
but you realize when you get money that those were the things that mattered all along anyway.
How did you get here? How did you get out of Bulgaria?
On a plane. I got here very young. So I knew very, very early on, you know, I had a very
tumultuous youth. And I basically kind of raised myself as probably the best way to
put it. So I graduated high school when I was 14 years old. And I thought that graduating
high school meant that I could get hired and I could go get a job. And not many people
in finance want to hire a 14 year old. So that was like a first harsh reality for me.
And then I got lucky that I got to come to the US. I came here when I was like 15 and
a half. I had a little bit of support from people that I knew here already, but basically
that amounted to 500 bucks. So I lived in this kind of communal house of over people
that are Bulgarian for the first year. It's kind of like a landing pad for immigrants.
Like if you don't speak the language really well, or you have no credit or you have no
phone, everybody kind of hooks you up. But I comes with a ton of strength. You have to
do those favors back. So I went that way for a year and then kind of found my footing and
started working. I was like, I would call it indoors because the first jobs you get
as an immigrant, like they're not fun. You're working in a retail or you're loading a truck
somewhere, you're doing catering. And I lived through that. And my big triumph was like getting
an indoor job, which was like so important to me at the time, you know? Like I just don't
want to be outdoors. Like they just put me in front of my computer and then it was all
fine from there. But getting to that point was like really a struggle.
I had a construction job for a summer when I was 18. It was horrible. I almost died every
day. I was stepping on nails. I was walking into rooms full of like just like bright yellow
dust. I'm like, I probably shouldn't be inhaling this, but I don't have a mask and everyone
else is walking in here. So let's do it. We're building a hotel. And I could not wait to
get out of that job. And I also appreciated working indoors with AC sitting in a cushy
chair so much more after that job. But I also have like kind of acclimated, like now I don't
appreciate the difference as much anymore because like that was like 15, 16 years ago.
And so I wonder like with you, you know, like you had this upbringing that was really tough,
but now you're like in Silicon Valley, like the people that you meet at coffee shops,
the people you talk to in podcast episodes of also like a living like this very cushy,
comfortable life. Sure.
How do you not have I guess how do you protect your values from changing? You know, like
how do you protect your ambition? Like you mentioned that you really want to like, you
know, take care of your grandparents, etc. But once you get to Silicon Valley, it's so
easy to be like, that's not enough. You know, I need to build the biggest unicorn ever and
I won't be happy unless I do that.
Well, I definitely like I wake up and go to bed with that drive, right? So building something
like that is important to me, like I have a clock and a timetable. When I want to take
my company public, I have a calendar and every day is like an act closer to that goal. So
I like I know when that's going to happen. It's not even a question. It's just more so,
like will I meet my own timetable or not?
You've got both. You've got the big Silicon Valley ambitions and the I'm happy if I take
care of my grandparents.
I think they feed each other for me. Like they're not they're not juxtaposed. Like they're
very, very together. So my grandparents, to give you an idea, I helped take care of them
and they are in the very last stages of life right now. They're both in hospice. They know
who I am on a very good day. So most of the time they don't know who I am. When you think
the one go for that transition in life, it gives you such a crazy realization of like
who do I want to be and how do I want to feel like when I'm 94. And for me, the really big
alignment I felt is that I felt that I wanted to be the person that built this company really
big. And for me, those two things feed each other because I believe my company exists
to do good in the world. I believe that people see that. And that's why we have like this
enormous support. And I believe that I'll leave things better than how I found them.
And for me, it's important to fight for that because then it means that being big and getting
scale is not a it's not a financial goal for me. It's a goal of reaching more people and
having more impact to what a cause that I feel like is important and something I would
feel proud of, you know, when I'm 94.
It's the thing I struggle with the most in Silicon Valley is burnout. And I'm like, 100%
not like the most balanced person enough something I struggle with quite a bit in my lifestyle.
Yeah, that's pretty common. And yeah, there's very little balance. There's a lot of go,
go, go, go, go. Oh, crap, I'm burned out. I can't do anything. Okay, I'm back. Let's
go, go, go, go, go. It's very common personality type, you know, like when you first start
in tech and you first start like kind of reading for like what tech is like a lot of the headlines
are like people are drinking coffee with butter in it and taking like ice baths and doing
like blood transfusions and God only knows what else like vitamin drips. And now I'm
like give me all of these things like I will take all of it like how does that even happen
to me? Am I really this person now? But it's just like anything for like an inch more performance,
right?
I think one of the things that makes us humans that we are adaptable, you know, you can take
a bunch of people put them in the Arctic and you know, assuming they don't all die, you
come back 100 years from now, like they all have all sorts of different tools and ways
of life and cultures. They just adapted to that environment and you take a bunch of people
you put them in Silicon Valley and you look what's going on. Yeah, there's crazy blood
transfusions and ice baths and all this stuff because you adapt to the culture and the lifestyle
of like working super hard to make your dream a reality. And that's not a culture that exists
everywhere. And I guess in recent months or years, I guess there's sort of a diaspora.
People are sort of moving away. You're mentioning potentially moving to Miami, you know, I live
in Seattle now. And so I don't know if the culture is necessarily going to change, but
it is a very real thing that who you are is flexible and that it depends a lot around
like what your goals are and where you are and what everybody around you is doing.
I want to ask you the same question back. How do you stay balanced? You build literally
one of the best communities on Earth and you have very similar things you're tackling,
right? You have to always kind of be on and to be supportive and to kind of live the same
value as your community. So how did you first deal with it when you started?
I wasn't balanced at all. Really?
It's probably fair to say that I get a relationship and because I started in the hackers because
I was working 80 hours a week and I was in go, go, go, go, go mode, you know, and that
was 2016. So I don't have any tips for how to do it well because I didn't do it well.
But at the same time, I think one of the cool things about a community, a true community
is that the value comes from the people who are part of the community. And as a community
creator, you're just sort of like shaping the space that other people can help each
other in. And the cool thing about it is when it's working, you can kind of step aside and
the community is doing its own thing. And it took a long time for any hackers to get
to that point. But like I can go, you know, camping for a week or two and come back. It's
still together. People are still equally as happy or unhappy as they were before I left
because they're like helping each other and they don't really depend on me to do very
much besides the podcast. And so nowadays it's much easier. But in the early days, I
was also subject to burnout. And I think it's pretty common.
You miss it. I feel like working at that base is just so addictive. I think a lot of times
people when they hear burnout, they're like a negative connotation to like, oh, you must
be working so hard that it's horrible. And instead, for me, it's just like, it's just
so interesting. I can't stop. It's like reading the most interesting book in the world, right?
It's just the actual emotion around that sometimes is extremely positive. And for me, it's like
when I left, what I left banking, banking for me was like a, you know, 100 hour a week
job, zero slave always on a plane. It was almost like I need 20 more hours. I'd get
super addicted to it sometimes. I mean, I think there's I mean, there's a lot of research
on this too, like what makes you happy and a job is like this combination of purpose,
autonomy and mastery. And so as a startup founder, like you're developing mastery, you're constantly
being, I guess, coming up against these very difficult to solve problems, many of which
have never been solved, or there's not a great guide to solve it. Or even if other people
have solved it at their company, it's gonna look different for years. And so you have
to figure out how to like solve that problem. And there's autonomy. Maybe you have investors,
maybe you have a board or something, but no one's really telling you what to do. Like
you wake up and do whatever you want. You know, you didn't have to do this podcast episode.
So you have like ultimate autonomy, which is so important, I think for happiness to
not have somebody telling you what to do, and to feel like your fate is in your own
hands. And then you have purpose. And I think, for me, purpose is where like, it's a combination
of having like this mission, this thing that you're doing that's bigger than yourself.
And so with candor, you're like helping make the world a better place. You're literally
helping people make more money at their jobs, be more fulfilled and acquire these skills
they didn't have. And when you're successful, it's like, that's bigger than you. You're
not just like enriching yourself, but you're helping other people. And that's awesome.
So with ending hackers, I had kind of the same thing. But I think the other half of
purpose, and this is where the hard work comes in, is doing things that make it kind of obvious
that it's not for yourself. And when you're working really, really hard and you're sweating
and you wake up and you feel a little bit miserable, it can't be more obvious like,
you know, this is for something bigger than me, because it's hard, you know, like my friend
just had a baby a year ago. And like, she's stressed a lot of the time, it's hard, you
know, and it's like, it's like that sort of amplifies a sense of purpose, because she's
like, you know, this is for this other person's life that I'm working so hard, etc. And so
I kind of miss it. But I agree with you that like, just because you're working really hard
doesn't necessarily mean that you're miserable. If you have those three things, you can be
working very hard and be super fulfilled and super happy. Yeah, it's just it's very, it's
very addictive, especially like if you're if you find it really interesting, right?
And I'm only two years old, like actually, let's even in two years, maybe I'm in a honeymoon
phase still. But I'm still in the phase where it's really, really interesting. And it's
actually hard. It's very hard for me to sleep, like it's one of the things I struggle with
the most, like I probably do four hours a night, five hours max, and that's like on
a good night. So I'll wake up and I'll have an idea. And then I'll write it down. And
I'm like, Oh, no, let me just flush it out just a little more. And then like, should
I say damn? I have a meeting in like 15 minutes. Like that was that we're sleeping tonight.
It's not great. You need sleep. And I'm not one to lecture. I just got this thing on my
wrist here is like a whoop. And it's a band that tracks your heart rate. It's pretty good.
Their app is awesome. They give you all sorts of stats about your sleep and your recovery
and all sorts of stuff just based on your heart rate. Because you want a lot of algorithms
on it. And my sleep is atrocious. I'm also averaging like four and a half, five hours
of sleep over the past like two months since I got it. And it's not even because I'm waking
up thinking about any sort of a crazy problem or anything. It's just like, I just don't
sleep that well. But I, I do think that it's important to sleep because I have like, like,
for example, this podcast, I slept pretty well last night. So I feel like on top of
my game, I feel like I can have a great conversation with you. Other podcasts, like you might listen
to me, I feel a little bit tired or whatever. I sound tired. And it's like directly correlated
to me not sleeping that well. And so I think it's a tricky balance as a founder to like
take care of yourself when your brain is racing and everything is so addictive and so fun.
Quite frankly, it's a lot more fun than lying in bed staring at the ceiling trying to go
back to sleep.
Yeah, no, 100%. I've really become like acutely aware of things like insulin resistant. And
I think that's, that's incredibly interesting. The relationship between how much sleep you
have in your insulin resistance or how you prop the stress. And I spent a ton of time
I think adjusting my my diet to be like much more optimized for like performance and also
much more optimized for just getting the energy like really nourishing my body and taking
care of myself. For me, like it's actually been very positive in a way to think about
these things. Because when I was not a founder, I didn't think as much about taking care of
myself. And when I became a founder, I actually like really got focused on taking care of
my body and doing therapy and, you know, exercising enough and sleeping more even though four
hours in the seem like a lot, it's actually a lot when you come from banking. So it's
still a lot for me.
But I actually become become healthier as a founder, at least in my mindset.
Yeah, I mean, I think it pushes you when you're doing hard things, you kind of have to pay
attention, you know, I have my car, I'm terrible with my car, I don't take it to the shop,
I just drive it around like the air pressure low on a tire because I don't care, right?
If I was a race car driver, and I had to perform super hard, like I would have a whole team
taking care of my car. But I want to talk about like this process of you becoming a
founder from the from the story from you like moving from Bulgaria to the US. Yeah, living
in like, sort of this landing pad. But like, how did you like, how did you come up with
the idea for candor? How did you get into I guess, the startup scene?
So worked in finance for most of my career. So I wanted to really understand how many
worked and my first finance job was in 2008. During the foreclosure crisis, I don't know
if you remember, it's not too long ago, but it feels like a century to me. And with the
world's horrible job in the world, but it taught me so so much. So essentially, I was
working for Freddie Mac, who is the company that owns all the mortgages that are serviced
by like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. And my job was to find out, first of all, why
people were not paying their loan, in which mortgage pools of loans basically were just
like not salvageable anymore, like the loans were bad. And that involved doing something
really human and involved like actually talking to people and literally going for people budget
like everything and trying to figure out if people are truthful about what they're saying
and how they're spending their money. And that was like a really big education for me
on just how people in the US dealt with money because a lot of things were new for me in
my country, there was like not really an established strong banking system, there was no credit,
like even having a debit card, you were like really cool if you had that, like all of these
things were like really new, right? And I became an expert on loss mitigation and essentially
dealing with very complex mortgage issues, which is how I ended up eventually consulting
and compliance and working a ton of compliance and then ultimately in private banking. And
I worked at a bank that basically services all of the richest people in the US. So they
deal with very kind of super interesting types of mortgages and complex product. And I started
at the bottom and like literally got promoted like six or seven times or something in like
five years and ended up working for the president, she's now the CEO.
Like talk to a bunch of people who couldn't pay their mortgages and learning, okay, here's
why people can't pay their mortgages. And then moving to this other sort of division
or place where you're talking to like, you're examining like the richest people who have
like the most complex deals, like what were some of the differences between like very
wealthy, I guess, financially savvy people and like the average American who was like
struggling to pay their mortgage or just was defaulting on their loans?
The biggest difference is access to knowledge. Honestly, like a lot of times the same financial
instrument is very beneficial for somebody who's wealthy or not even known as a helpful
thing for somebody who is not wealthy and has not historically had access. So I'll give
you an example of something that's not one of the just trusts are a really good example.
If you're someone who's wealthy, you 100% have spoken to a trust officer, you've talked
about your estate or how much money you're leaving. And maybe some of the assets you
have are even moved around trust, your mortgage might be in a trust, all your stuff might
be in some kind of shelter to kind of optimize your taxes to, you know, figure things out.
People think that trusts are just for rich people. And so we have historically not really
recommended or even thought about trust as something that's for me or for someone like
me, right? For a regular person. In fact, it's one of those powerful things for friends
as people in tech, when you have a highly appreciating security and you're being paid
in like a stock or like an RSU, getting into trust and understanding trust fairly early
in your career is enormously powerful. And so the difference is really between outcomes
is one person really knew how to utilize the things they had available to them. The other
person didn't even know things were available to them. So it's not necessarily about the
amount of money you have. It's about the access to how to manage that money. It can have very
little money, but you could have a lot of knowledge on how to manage it. And you will
be absolutely in a better position than someone who never even knew things were available
to them. People are not educated about how to use credit. And we like to think about
it as like, Oh, well, this person just doesn't know. No, it's society's responsibility if
we're going to accept something as for why it is like credit that we educate people before
they get it. And that doesn't mean like, you know, education sometimes has a kind of condescending
like you need to be educated. It's more so just like understand very practically how
it works. We don't advertise financial products practically, we advertise them as points to
go on vacation, right? And people really want and they're hungry for that information. But
you know, it's very hard to find a source of truth. So that's the biggest difference.
You'd see people would make bad financial choices, they'd go deeper into credit, or
they would not structure their budget well, or they didn't know that they could actually
avoid a ton of liability by putting something in a trust or by structuring things differently.
And a lot of times, it's just those circumstances that led to foreclosure. Sure, you know, losing
a job is one of those things that you can't structure away. But it could have been a significantly
lesser blow had people you know, had access to friends to understand how they could purchase
insurance or had access to understand how they can compound their savings in an investment
account and not just hold it in cash that could have been much more overtime.
It's super interesting. I mean, it leads directly into the candor because candor is basically
bridging the scap, right? People don't necessarily have the information. They're not educated
to make these great decisions. And so you start this company candor and okay, now you're
educating people to help them make better financial decisions. Was that like the motivation?
Like what what made you decide this is what I should do as a business, I should do a startup
and here's what it should be.
I felt like everyone I was interviewing at the time, so I was hiring data scientists
and I was fortunate to interview people from you know, really good companies like Apple,
Goldman, you know, Facebook, you name it. And those people were very experienced and
they were still like not negotiating at all. And we would put out a price and they would
say, great, I'll come work here or they really wouldn't self advocate. And it really struck
me as odd. And I remember at some point I started telling people like you can ask me
for more.
You should negotiate with me.
Yes, you should negotiate with me. And then I started researching and understood that
like this actually not as common practice as I thought it would be because in finance
everyone negotiates everything. But in fact, it's actually much less accepted. Finance
you live and die by the arbitrage, right? So don't hate the player, hate the game.
It's part of your skill set. Like that's your skill set. When you're in tech like your skill
set is like, I am good at marketing or I am good at coding this thing. And this other
part of my job, right, negotiate my salary is not really my expertise. So it's not part
of the culture, I guess.
Yeah. And then kind of I went to a lot of banker meetings also and I realized there's
like it's a twofold issue. Like first people don't know that they are the most, some of
the most valuable members of society, right? They're literally building the future. They're
building everything I use every day. And the skill set is much more valuable than face
value. And people were not really taught or made to believe that that's true. And I felt
like that was a method of service, not just to them as individuals, but like society like,
why are we watching the Kardashians like I want to know which engineer build like a product
that I use, right? That's what I care about. And so I really felt that that is a pain point.
And I also just understood that people would come and try to get a financial product and
their access to that was much lower because they were getting paid in stock. So on the
other side, banking hadn't evolved enough to understand how to underwrite somebody who
got paid solely in stock, how to give them a mortgage and how to give them equal access.
So it was a two-sided issue. On one side, you know, we have a lot of people who are
either first gen or come from a very different mentality in their field who don't know they
could ask for more, also don't know they have access to a ton of financial instruments.
On the other side, you have like a whole system that hasn't evolved since the 80s to bridge
that gap. And I felt that was messed up in so many ways. So we started with the negotiation
because we wanted to understand how people handle their money. And so for a year, we
sort of had conversations with people around not just how to negotiate your salary, but
what are you actually going to do with that money? And why do you want more money? And
how does that fit into everything that you're doing in understanding very deeply, like how
people view money in tech and why they have certain conceptions of it before we decide
it would what first product roll out.
So when I think about a startup, the first thing I think about is what problem are you
solving for people? Because you learn a lot about a company based solely on the problem
that you're solving. You learn what kind of customers they might have, how much money
they might be able to charge based on how, you know, valuable that problem is, how frequently
the customers might use their product based on how frequently that problem occurs, etc.
But then you have all these other parts of a startup, which is like, okay, how do you
get distribution and actually reach your customers? And what is the actual product or service
you're providing, etc. And what's your business model? So what did that look like for Kendra?
And this is the first year where you're helping with salary negotiation and what to do, what
people should do with their salaries. We're like, okay, well, how are you doing that?
You know, how are you reaching and finding these people? What did that look like?
David and I had already, you know, had a fairly strong reputation for negotiating. So like
on on weekends, we would literally hold like a salon in our living room and people could
come and like whatever the negotiation or career issue would sort of handle it together
and started like what our friends and then it kind of got forwarded along. So literally
put a page up with here's our salary negotiation guide. We didn't even think about starting
a company yet. And the salary negotiation guide went super viral really fast. We did
not intend to it was literally a thing we sent people to say, we can't like we both
have full time jobs. We can't like set a negotiated pre but like here's everything you should
know. If you're thinking that covered in there, then like, please email me a specific question.
And so we understood immediately would like discovered a pain point. And I think very
quickly after starting the business COVID hit, and we realized that people were negotiating
jobs but getting their roles rescinded, which means the company pulled the position from
under you. Budgets were changing companies were laying people off. It's COVID first hit.
Right. And so all these people that were negotiating the salaries, they majority of them had no
job on the company would pull the job in the last minute, and everyone was scrambling.
A lot of companies were laying off. So David, my co founder decided to make that information
public. So we knew which companies were doing this, which we consider to be like a really
grave offend, not even telling a person they don't have a job to just show up and they're
like, Oh, yeah, joking about that. So we published the list and the list went viral. Within the
first day, we had over a million views on the website. And then like the second for
day, like it actually broke our site at Google, like it broke everything. We got a notification
but from like Google that our Gmail was shut off because we're getting too many emails.
So we had to like email them to like get some separate account to convince them we're not
spam because we're getting mad volume and we've got like the EU of government reach
out to us to ask for the data like the the like Air Force and Pentagon I think could
push supply chain issues because we're like the list of who was laying people off.
So how many how many companies were on this list? Was it just tech companies?
It started with just tech companies and then we let people add any companies that started
with like 200 and I think it ended up close to 10,000. And people would real time put
in comments and we had volunteers from the community that would read and sort the comments
and make sure you know, they're not like hearsay or inaccurate yet companies reach out to us
and make statements would post company statement. I've spoken to the like chief marketing officer
of almost every public tech company in like the first three months of starting candor.
And that was very intimidating because some people have reached out to us and say, like
you're about to jack up our stock price. If you tell people we're laying people off, I'm
like, are you laying people off? Well, yeah, I'm like, okay, then what do you want me to
do?
Yeah, that's the truth. What's going on? You're jacking up your own stock price.
Yeah, we have this founder reach out and I don't know how he got my number. If he was
like, hey, we're about to close the deal. If we close the deal, we don't have to lay
these people off. So like, can you hold on just like posting it for a day? And it was
just kind of crazy. So I went from like somebody that like people at tech didn't know it's
like everybody in tech knew who I was. And it was very intimidating for me because I'm
super private. So it was good for the company, but it was just like a very tough personal
period for me at the time.
Yeah. How did you handle like suddenly being so public and recognizable?
I did not enjoy it. I grew up idolizing people who kind of created something larger than
themselves and left the mark. Those are the people that I really respected growing up.
And I really wanted to be like that someday. And I think a lot of my perceptions of what
companies are like and cultures are like really got shattered in that like one month period
where we hosted the list because you have some of the companies who have the like most
friendly brands externally, literally going AWOL on me. And it was very clear, like they
didn't care if like hundreds of people had no jobs overnight or that they'd screwed somebody
who like just had a baby and they just like pulled their job offer. Then they absolutely
gave like zero F's. And that really broke my perception of like how real this culture
on the outside versus the inside. And that's kind of how the newsletter got born. I started
really realizing that what companies were saying externally and what people were experiencing
internally were really like out of the very, very odd of the spectrum of some time. And
I felt like the responsible thing to do was to just give people transparency.
So yeah, let's talk about your newsletter because your newsletter I mentioned earlier
is one of my favorite newsletters in tech. I would describe it as like this perfect combination
of like gossip and money and useful information. And so every time I read it, I'm just like
rubbing my hands together like this is super juicy, you had to need to get the dirt and
you're in this, I don't know, you're just in this cool position where you just get to,
I guess, get access to all this information that people would love to have. But of course,
companies probably don't want shared. Sure. Yeah, I got a lot of what I call love mail
from companies. And my answer is always the same. If I'm wrong, please, please let me
know how I'm wrong. Exactly. I'm happy to post anything you want. And surprisingly,
no one's asking you to post anything yet. So you can sign up at candor.co slash newsletter.
And when you go there, the description is like the newsletter for top tech professionals,
the weekly scoop on who's hiring, which teams are the hottest and who's on the move directly
from tech's top salary negotiator. And there's a picture of you right next to it. Part of
why you're so recognizable. But yeah, when I read your newsletter, I mean, like part
of it is super personal. Like you talk about your life in the intro, you talk about what's
going on with you, but a lot of it is like really gossipy. Like you were saying, I think,
you know, RSU sales are up Zuckerberg sales weekly shares for four and a half billion
dollars so far in 2021. You know, others who are on stage selling plans include Jeff Bazer.
So Gabe Rann, Larry Page, you know, you're talking about what these very recognizable
companies and names are doing. Yeah, for some reason, as like a reader, like that just clicks
with me. I'm like, Oh, I want to know what they're doing. Because maybe that informs
what I should be doing. And then I'm like, how does Nia even know what they're doing?
Well, I mean, I should probably say like, I built and led a team in banking that was
essentially one of the top competitive intelligence teams in the industry. So I have a lot of
experience in getting the good gossip. And I really enjoy it. I think there's an angle
to companies we don't often get to see. And a lot of times we think of companies as one
dimensional, we think of companies as the product they're building. There's a lot more
than that. And I really hope that in my writing, people understand how the product and the
people together end up informing the market price, and how things move and why they move
a certain way, hopefully is less of a mystery. In my writing than I think it is just kind
of day to day trying to figure out if it's a good idea to join a company or not.
Earlier this year, you're telling me about your newsletter, you said it was like, a super
viral, I don't know how fast it was growing. I took notes, I take notes whenever I talk
to somebody like reading through my notes, it's like it's a viral newsletter, you had
a 65% open rate, and that's where you spill all the gossip. What do you think it is about
the newsletter that makes it so viral? Because a lot of people would love to have a newsletter
that people actually read. But like, frankly, most newsletters that I read, even if they're
useful, they're not that viral, like I don't want to share them with people, I don't want
to talk to other people about it. They certainly don't have 70% open rates. What's special
about your newsletter?
Well, I think two things, I think it provides information you can't find anywhere else.
I think there's a kind of unique component to it. It also talks about companies in a
way that I just don't see broken down anywhere else. I think a lot of times you'll find really
amazing reporting in places like diverge or protocol, which, you know, I worship those
publications and some of those reporters are both friends and people I look up to. But
it's lacking the financial aspect that Bloomberg would have. Or you'll find something on a
tech forum hidden somewhere. You know, some people on Reddit or blind are just shooting
the shit, but like they don't have the full context of how that affects the stock. And
for me, those things like don't be separately, they live together. And it's really important
to understand all of those things at the same time. I also obviously have access to understanding
how companies work by virtue of a research company, the Tunfer for Klein. And so I think
what makes it viral is first how honest it is and second, how unique the information
is that you get at once. It almost feels like that's the one thing you have to read that
informs you and gives you a full perspective. You don't have to keep digging on everything.
And I think the third thing is I think the intention of the newsletter is really clear.
The intention is to kind of create more equity of information. And I think people really
resonate with that message because we live true to that message. I don't not publish
something because it's going to make somebody look bad. It's very, very clear that if there's
information that's bad, I'm still going to publish it because everyone in the community
needs to know. And I think people realize that's genuine. And I don't always get the
best response from companies for writing this newsletter. And there's situations where we've
had company CEOs reach out and very senior people get forwarded on it. There was a case
where we announced a bunch of VP resignations before the CEO of a public company even knew
that were happening. And so they reached out and were like, how the hell do you know? And
why the hell are you publishing it? And I was like, well, hi. Very intimidating, but
hi. And like, is it true? It's true. So I'm not going to take it out. So it's super good.
And it's, you know, when I think about it, I think a lot of it is like this word gossip,
which is not necessarily a bad thing. The gossip is this bad connotation, but I read
a lot of evolutionary psychology books and they all talk about gossip because like we're
extremely gossipy creatures. Something like 80% of all human communication is talking
about other people who aren't in the room. And also something like 85% of gossip is like
either neutral or positive. It's not always negative. It's mostly just like useful. And
I think it's just very useful as a person to know what other people in your quote unquote
tribe are doing. You know, like if you can imagine like a bunch of different human tribes
all out in the wilderness, the tribes were the people gossiped the most were probably
the most efficient, like well put together tribes where everybody knew like, Oh, Joseph
is really good with the spear or, you know, so-and-so is really good at cooking and everyone
kind of knew who to trust and who not to trust. And so they could function better as a team.
And so I think kind of the structure of like what you're doing with your newsletter where
you're like kind of telling everyone in tech, like here's what these execs are doing. Here's
what these companies are doing. Like it's just providing useful information so everybody
can make better decisions and actually I guess more efficient decisions in a way like you're
making this whole industry more efficient by providing information that people might
not want to be out there.
Yeah, but I mean, information has a life of its own, right? Like nobody owns information.
And I think a lot of times like big companies are under the fallacy of like, they can control
the narrative. And sometimes, you know, they've been successful in doing that in the past.
But in reality, whether I'm writing this newsletter or not, people are still going to talk about
it. So this is kind of the place where those things that no one, you know, everyone's talking
about and everyone knows, I just kind of air it out. So I'm also just not talking about
things that are just, you know, I wouldn't even say they're considered controversial
takes because if you spend enough time with tech people, you know, that's exactly what's
going on in the company they work on. It's just more so like, for the first time, it's
leaking outside of the company, like we're used to only experiencing that when we're
inside.
I think that's a great disservice because before you go to work somewhere, I think you're
entitled to know what it's actually like. And what would that be the place you're going
to come to do your best work? Or what kind of people like it would be really, really
successful in helping make that place bigger and better. You know, for instance, if I was
going to like, go apply for Twitter today, and I was a consumer PM, I would be like overjoyed
because that's one of the biggest challenges they need to solve, right? So they need to
figure out how to make money from that. And I would want to know that I would not want
to join there if I was like nine little or something. And my job would be the least priority
for the whole company, right? I want to join the hot seat, like I want to know where I'm
going to be visible and what are your shareholders looking for? And therefore, what are executives
looking for from me?
I think it makes everything better for information to be transparent. Because like, if you live
in a world where it's likely that anything that you do as a company is going to become
public information, like that's a pretty strong incentive to do things well, because you might
be on the front page of Hacker News or whatever, you know, or like, you know, the subject line
of the candor newsletter, because you didn't do things well. And so it incentivizes people
I think to be better. And I like the the cemetery too, because like as an employee, like come,
your employees want to know about you, like you have to give them a resume, they might
look into your background, like if you tweet the wrong thing, you might be fired. So like,
you probably want to know what's going on with them as well.
And it's kind of crazy, like, I never intended for this many people to read it. So it's kind
of one of the other examples of like, I'm not super comfortable with being like the most
public person, but it just kind of happened. You know, I won't betray this person's confidence,
but somebody I know who writes for the information told me we officially have more subscribers
than the information. And so now I'm like, Oh, my God, I'm really scared. I, you know,
from the aspect of like, I want to make sure the information continues to be useful. And
I want to understand more of who the readers are. So we also like get to know people we
do board game night, we're doing like a magic the gathering tournament in January, we have
like zoom calls where people get to know each other. So it's not just like, I'm sending
this to a list of random people, like people come together, and they like socialize with
each other get value on the two. And I think that's a big part of what it's viral to do
is like, people feel like it's for others exactly like that. And when they meet these
people in person, it's actually super powerful when you see who the other readers are. So
I think they're super enjoy meeting each other. That's been the best part for me is like connecting
people in real life.
Yeah, you're building a community around all your content. And it's not just your newsletter.
It's not just your podcast appearances. You've got like, you know, another section on your
website that's just guides, and you've a guide to salary negotiation, a guide to perform
interviews, a guide to how to quit, how to survive a layoff, or how to work from home
or how to get more from your RSU. How does all of this feed into like your mission today?
Because as you said, like the first year of Canada was like pretty much just all about
salary negotiation. Nowadays, it's more about RSU management. Like how does all this play
together?
I think careers have changed substantially in the last 20 years, right? Our parents were
doctors and lawyers, for those of us, you know, that had parents or doctors and lawyers,
which you know, I'm not part of, but those were the big professions, right? So if you
were a doctor or a lawyer, you got paid cash, it was a lot of cash, you then got an investment
advisor who helps you pull this cash somewhere. And that was it. That's the kind of beginning
and end of complexity of life for you. Can I make it into a good school to get into those
questions? But things have really changed in the last 20 years. And now picking a job
is in itself an investment. And we have not evolved sufficiently to be able to help people
do that in a way that is, you know, really honoring the commitment a person is taking
when they take a job.
Whether you're going to work for Snapchat or Facebook or Google or a startup, have massive
financial implications for you if over 50% of your income is going to come from equity.
And if you're senior, it could be 70, it could be 80%. I have clients that make, you know,
300K on paper and get like $4 or $5 million in RSU's. So if that is how you, nobody's
supporting you in making that decision right now, right? And so for me, these two things
are actually very connected because the new like banking 2.0 is the wealth management
starts with help if you pick a career. It doesn't start with the moment that you cash
out. It doesn't start with the moment where you're liquid enough for everyone to want
your business, picking a career, understanding that career, knowing what to do with it, when
to move to whatever company, when to vest, when to, when to use your vested stuff for
something else, when to reinvest it, like what are you doing? Those are all interrelated.
And anyone in banking today who is not thinking about managing careers and money together
is absolutely crazy and will be faked out in the next 10 years. So that's kind of the
mission behind Candra. And that's why there's so many guys, people like, why are you telling
me how to quit my job if you try to manage my equity? Well, because you could probably
make a lot more equity across the street, go ahead and look at the salaries currently,
you probably should move. And here's how to do it. And here's how to make more money.
And banking is so far behind on the 8th ball on that. Like if you go to your wealth advisor
or your banker and you're like, Hey, I'm about to work for Netflix, what should I know? That
would be like, well, do you want to open a check in car or say there's a cow? Like they're
not going to tell you. No, they're not going to. And even if you come with all the facts,
they're not going to help you. So usually what people, you know, did before Candra is
people who could afford to hire an attorney. And there's five or six people at the Valley
that are really known for tech compensation. They mostly do executives, very expensive
between seven, $800 an hour. Sometimes you have to hire an accountant because if you're
more senior, you actually get the financials of the company because you take a job. So
you have to see if your equity will be worth something. Sometimes people hire like a CEO
coach or just a coach, even if they're not a CEO, so they can actually go through a more
intensive negotiation. And nowadays people talk to each other and it's bizarrely expensive.
Right.
And I think that's messed up. I think that should be rolled into your banking. And whoever
is going to help you make financial decisions needs to understand where your money came
from to begin with.
Does that mean Candra's greatest ambition is to be a bank?
I would say, you know, eventually we could be the next Goldman Sachs, but I feel like
Morgan Stanley is probably a bit of a better example.
Morgan Stanley. Okay.
Yeah.
The next Morgan Stanley, how do you get from where you are today? And we haven't even talked
about your business model, like how Candra makes money today.
Sure, sure.
What is that? And like, what are the steps you need to follow to become the next Morgan
Stanley?
Well, I'm not going to give you the roadmap in case you're looking for a thing to do,
but I'll tell you what we're doing now.
Tell me exactly your plans.
Essentially what we do now is we help people who get paid in RSEs, a public company, get
access to those RSEs. So we help people get liquidity, even during blackout or, you know,
even outside of trading periods, we can help people act with their stock, which significantly
helps reduce volatility, get to a better position with diversification, reduce concentration
risk and reduce market risk, which you all follow as a tech employee, even if your company
has not told you about that, which is another big thing I'd love there to be changing the
world is for companies to explain your compensation as an investment and not just as like, here's
some free money.
So we help people realize how to manage their RSEs, how to get liquidity out of them, diversify
them really well, and we sort of automate all of that practice for you, which would
be ridiculous if you were doing it manually. That's what we do today.
Just to explain some terminology to listeners, like a blackout period might be, if you were
going to work at Salesforce, and they're going to have, I don't know, an earnings call coming
up, they're like, you're legally not allowed as an employee, I think to sell for a certain
period. And that happens like every quarter, right?
It's a little bit more intense than that. So for most companies, you can only sell usually
once in a quarter. So during even if there's nothing special going on, most tech companies
consider employees insiders, and that's a vestige of the stock scandals, essentially
in the 80s, when we made everybody an insider, even if they're a regular employee.
And so you can only sell typically only during an earnings call right after. It just so happens
that it's also the most volatile time for the stock, because earnings calls usually
introduce performance information, company might not have done well, or might have done
really well, the price is going to fluctuate the most either way right after an earnings
call.
So instead of waiting like once every three months to sell, we help people sell gradually
on a weekly basis, you come in with that you have on a stage selling plan, and you could
gradually sell your RSU. That's better, because first, you're going to get a better average
price if you sell over a longer period of time versus just dump whenever you're allowed
to. The second reason why it's better is because it's incredibly, incredibly dangerous to hold
this much market risk in your portfolio. So most investor advisors recommend not having
more than 10% in any app that most tech employees have more than 50% of all of their wealth
in RSU. So you need to divest yourself of that as fast as possible and diversify it
in things you think will perform similarly well or better or things that you believe
in, but you cannot have all of your wealth in one stock, and still, you know, feel like
you're doing the best that you can, because essentially, we're conditioned to believe
that having all of our wealth in this one stock makes us a good employee, makes us loyal
to the company, makes us, you know, this is what you're supposed to do. This is how people
got rich. But on the other hand, you're seeing people like Mark Zuckerberg and basically
every tech executive sell their stock because it's not the optimal position. The biggest
believers are divesting, because that's what you're supposed to be doing. Then why are
we not telling employees they even have the option to do that, which is pretty crazy.
And it's so different being a founder and an employee, you know, like you could be loyal
to the company and be a good employee, but like if you're working at like a 10,000 person
company as an engineer, what are the chances that the individual decisions that you make
day to day are going to move the stock price? Not that much. If you're the founder of your
Mark Zuckerberg, you're running the ship, of course, it makes more sense to be more
aligned to have a higher percentage of your net worth and your own business, et cetera,
because you're making these huge decisions and like, you know, that actually affect things.
And so I think a lot of people listening to this show, like they're indie hackers, they're
founders, they're starting companies, you know, the similar companies do well, a huge
percentage of their net worth is going to be in the equity for their company. But if
you're an employee, which also a lot of people listen to the show are employees, like working
on businesses on the side, you probably don't want like, as you said, 50% or more of your
net worth and your employer's stock.
Yeah, I mean, tech stocks have a particular property, most of them are considered to be
growth stocks, right? And growth stocks are subject to higher volatility. And volatility
just means that the stock fluctuates more. So sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low,
but it's just more frequently higher or low than, you know, the average market. And any
time it's low, you lose the ability to compound your earnings. That's essentially how you
make money with investment this through compounding. So if your stock has been low for your four
times, that's enough in some cases to erase any of the growth that you might have been.
Even if the company does super well, you could have actually done better in many cases were
just the same with much less risk and a better diversified portfolio. In this compounding
aspect and volatility aspect is what most of the time tech companies don't really inform
you of when they first pay your stock. They tell you like the stock is going to go up.
Yes, but the road it took to go up is very, very important to ultimately how much money
you're going to make or lose in your company. And that's the biggest reason why senior people
end up selling part of their stock is A, so they are not as concentrated and B, because
they're diversifying into investment that have lower volatility. And this is especially
important in inflation. So historically, we've seen, you know, many periods of inflation
before and growth stocks, especially in IT, underperform inflation by a ton. And while
tech has been going up and up and up for the last, you know, five years, we're all accustomed
to seeing the upwards movement. There is no guarantee that it's going to hold in inflation,
especially considering the historical data and performance. And if you're trapped in
not being able to sell your stock until earnings call, you could just be sitting by the sidelines
watching it, you know, basically flow down very fast without being able to do anything.
So for some people, they still have the high risk tolerance and they want to keep all of
it. And I respect that and I understand it. But I think people are entitled to a choice.
I think people are entitled to have the information of pros and cons. What if I keep it? What
if I sell it? What if I keep all of it? What if I sell all of it? What if it's just some
part of it? What happened? And those conversations are what we're missing in the discourse in
tech and banking right now. We're telling people that like, either keep it all or sell
it all. And these are both not perfect solutions, because you're not telling people the underlying
reason of how the stock is affected in either direction. People are smart enough to decide
for themselves, you just need to give them the information.
What is the most like, talking to you about your story, it all seems like such smooth sailing,
you know, it's like launch a newsletter, wildly popular, you know, put up this list, wildly
popular, like we've got this product, we're going all the way to Goldman Sachs level.
What's the hard part of running candor? What's got you stressed? What's got you working hard?
Like, what are the I guess the biggest challenges like you have to overcome?
Maybe maybe a different angle. Let me let me kind of tell you what keeps me keeps me awake
at night. So I think there's there's two things that I really think about a lot. One thing
that I think about a lot is whether or not there's sufficient awareness of how finance
works broadly in tech for people to to understand the product really quickly. So we have a product
that is very complicated, right? So people need to understand how investments work, how
stocks work, how inflation works, all of these things before they purchase the product. And
we do a really great job of it now. But the problem is, we need to societal really great
job at it. Like, it's not just a candor problem. It's an industry problem. And sometimes this
problem is exacerbated by competing incentives. Most companies really want their employees to
be educated, and want employees to have that information, but lack the tools to do it because
banks and investment firms, they don't really come in and give you education on how any
of this works. However, the discourse in tech on the individual level, is very much like
my friend said X, I heard some other person did Y. And we're still in the kind of word
of mouth mentality because companies are not coming out and educating people broadly on
how stock works. And as an industry, we don't really have yet concentrated knowledge based
on how this works, everything feels very new. And people are still relying on word of mouth.
So the thing that, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, what needs to invest
for people in tech to see their stock as an investment, and not just as, you know, this
is free money, and if it appreciates great, if it doesn't appreciate, that's fine too.
We're past that point, too much of our pay is an equity to not look at this as an investment.
The second thing that keeps me awake at night is inflation. I think very few people realize
how fast inflation can hit. I remember inflation from my youth, it was for 300% when I was
growing up, growing at a, you know, 7% or 6.8% clip or something was the last reporting
on the CPA. And inflation can make a lot of things happen very, very fast, especially
in growth stock. So it worries me like, will we be able to get to enough people in visibility
before you know, people actually start seeing losses, you know, I see it as a social responsibility
to help people understand how inflation works and how it could affect them. And it feels
still very nebulous to a lot of people. So we've been doing a lot of calls around inflation
and trying to get the community to see what resources exist or what research is out there.
So those are two things I think about. And this is not a problem one company is going
to solve as much as I love my company. And I think my company is the future. I know that
this only works if multiple companies are doing right. And so I would like to have more
competition running candor because that means that there's more awareness broadly. It's
not a cool thing. It's an important thing. And there's a really big distinction, right?
I agree with you. It's something to be passionate about. And I love talking to founders like
you who actually are aware of the impact that you're having. And like when you can confidently
say you want there to be more competitors, because you're thinking about the bigger picture,
like that's just sort of proof positive. And I agree with you about the challenge. Like
if I had to guess the most difficult challenge for candor, I would say it's the education
piece, because in any hackers, we're also doing education. And like it is hard to help
people learn. It's very hard. There's a lot of information for people to digest. It's
not always immediately obvious. It takes a lot of patience and time for people to learn
these types of things. And I think education is one of those things where like, it's just
more effective in small groups, which makes it harder to reach scale with education, you
know, like, you can have 10 people in a room or 100 people on a webinar, and reach them
much more impactfully than, you know, 10,000 people reading a blog post, for example, but
then you're not reaching as many people. And so I think education is super difficult, but
it's cool to watch how you're doing it and all the different ways that you're making
this sort of your educational resources, like really entertaining and fun and gossipy and
useful at the same time. And I'm really, I really appreciate it. I think one last note
on education, because it's something I think about a ton is like, sometimes it's easier
to help people learn than to help people unlearn and then learn. And I think that the challenge
is we've taught people that investment is like an impulse decision that it's really
easy to buy something on Robinhood at like one second, you could trade it back. And there's
a really big difference between speculation and investment and a really big difference
between building a legacy and something that like, can not just power you but power the
community around you if you build sufficient wealth. And so I think the challenge with
education and everyone who's working in consumer FinTech is how do you teach people that responsibility
actually pays more in the long run? Things that seem easy aren't always profitable and
things that seem profitable aren't always easy. So unlearning to learn is hard because
by building so much infrastructure in FinTech, we've forgotten of an industry, I think, at
the end of the day, it affects real people. And it affects real people balance sheet and
affects, you know, how much they're going to be able to pay for like groceries and things
that are like that they're super, super simple. And so you have to teach people that it's
not just like Robinhood and Bethting, it's really thinking about your kids, your family,
your parents, in figuring out what all of those other people in your life, plus you
really need and what does wealth look like for you? And why do you care about wealth
at all? And what are you going to do with it? And having these like more holistic and
deeper conversations about money, and that is harder. But ultimately, it's important
if we actually want to make a meaningful with community level change and not just like a
company as fund change. Yeah, what's your sort of close things out, you know, your founder,
people listening to this are aspiring founders are already founders, what's your advice to
founders for how they should think about this kind of stuff or just running their companies?
The thing that I've appreciated most becoming a founder is that I had industry experience
before I did it. Almost every day working has reinforced the fact that doing that first
before I founded my company has been like very transformational for me. It has saved
me a lot of headache and a lot of heartache that I'm sure our founders and my field specifically
in fintech phase. So I think the thing I would recommend for anyone who wants to be a founder
is figure out what would make you feel the most secure and prepared. For me, it was working
in the field and really deeply understanding the field for other people, it might be reading
something or meeting a ton of people. But don't just go in it on a good idea and hope
it's going to work out. If your company is even mildly successful, it takes over all
of your life. You're going to live this, breathe this, wake up with it, go to bed with it.
It is all consuming. Many times, you will not see friends because you have to ship something
might have to work weekend because something broke, you probably will miss holidays with
your family. It is an all consuming quest to build something better for the world. So
you really, really want to make sure you're prepared for the journey and the journey is
incredibly fun and exhilarating and is the most rewarding thing you will ever do emotionally
whether you succeed or fail. But it also will take everything you've got. And so before
you start, take a vacation, make sure you've done all of your research or you feel emotionally
and mentally prepared. Because once you're in it, you can't go out of it. You can't be
a part time founder. It is the one thing that will eat all of your life. Maybe for some
people it's different. That's kind of my experience. But that's my advice is pack your bags before
you go traveling. Pack your bags before you go traveling. Nia Dragova, thanks so much
for coming on the show. Where can people go to find out more about what you're up to at
Candor? Maybe subscribe to your newsletter as well.
Sure. So we're at candor.co. And you can also find me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I
have a fairly unique name, so I'm the only result that popped up. Please connect with
me if you have any questions.
Alright, thanks again, Nia.