Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Matthew Spoke, the CEO and founder of Moves Financial Moves is an all-in-one banking app designed exclusively for gig workers. Matt, thank you so much for joining the episode. I'm really excited to chat with you and, and dive deeper into what you're doing at Moves and, and kind of capitalizing on the gay economy. But before we dive into all that, what were you doing before you started the company?

Matthew: Well first I'm, I'm pumped to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I, I love sort of the, inside look and the founder stories, so I'm glad and sort of humbled to be ableto share mine. But yeah, a quick backstory. I started Moves about two and half years ago, so this, not, not super deepened into this journey. It's my second company. Before this, I, I had, I had built a company in the Web3 sort of crypto space back in 2016. So I was in that, in that space for about four years. . And then at the end of 2019, started getting a lot of a lot of attention started shifting towards the gig economy problems that were happening in this space.

Matthew: And, and just thedomain that I, I knew very little about frankly. And, and particularly not onlygig workers, but also like financial services in the traditional sense. I camefrom spending a bunch of time figuring out financial services in anon-traditional sense of crypto. But I wanted to learn something new and putmyself through a new challenge.

Matthew: But, and if you rewindfar enough back before 2016 I was a cpa, so pretty maybe different backstory interms of how it got started and one day decided to make the leap from from aworld of public accounting to to trying myself out as an entrepreneur. And it'sbeen fun ever since. So...

Julian: Yeah. What was that,What, what was the catalyst behind making that decision?

Matthew: Well, I mean, I, Ithink from the very beginning, I remember before even gonna university tellingmy parents that I was gonna go study accounting. And my dad's reaction waslike, Are you sure? Like, that doesn't really seem like it fits yourpersonality, or, or, or what we would've thought you would.

Matthew: But, you know, Ididn't really have a good framework to think about my education or my goalsother than I was good at math. Numbers made sense to me. I wanted to go intobusiness, but like, I wanted to be able to apply sort of like my skills in mathto that and accounting. I didn't, frankly, I didn't even equate the differencebetween accounting and finance at that.

Matthew: So it was, it was anarea to just like sink my, my, my like education, my four years of educationinto, at that point, once you study accounting and university, you're on thislike automatic path towards like working in an accounting firm, becoming a cpa,getting designated very quickly. I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do outtamy, with my career, but I figured, you know, I started down this path.

Matthew: It's valuable skillset and knowledge to. Let me finish and then once I'm finished I will figureout what I wanna do next. And finishing. I live in Canada, so in the Canadiancontext generally means you gotta spend about three or four years after schoolto complete sort of your professional certification.

Matthew: And then you can sortof figure out what you wanna go do next. So I knew I was leaving, It wasn'tquite sure, it wasn't quite obvious to me that I was gonna go become anentrepreneur, but a whole bunch of stuff sort of lined up and stars aligned forme to take a risk.  

Julian: Did you have, duringthat time, did you have an idea of becoming an entrepreneur or, or were theseskills kind of leading to you or experiences?

Julian: A lot of, a lot offounders I speak to, they either kind of have that, that itch that that'sinside them, even though they're, they're beginning the experience, they canuse that to build skills or it's almost like an aha moment. Like, Okay, I thinkthis is the compelling reason that I should transition and, and, you know, payattention to this, this this feeling that I have kind of full time.

Julian: What was, was thereany of that in there?  

Matthew: I don't know that Iwas ever like, call it naturally groomed to be an entrepreneur. I think it waslike a slow realization. So for one while I was working in accounting early inmy career, my brother was the entrepreneur in the family, had a whole bunch ofstartups and he, he, he was starting o over the co of course, of a couple ofyears.

Matthew: He tried starting acouple of startups and then where I could, I always sort of helped out, youknow, helped out on their, their fi, their bookkeeping, their finances, theirjust like basic, basic stuff. Setting up their payroll systems. But I alwayshad this like passenger seat, watching my brother sort of like take the risksthat I had not yet taken in my career.

Matthew: It also so happened inthose early day or those later days in my, in my couple years in accounting iswhen I discovered Bitcoin for the first time. And again, my bro, my brother,same brother is the one who, who sort of introduced me to the concept ofBitcoin and pretty quickly became fascinated with that.

Matthew: I think my interest inBitcoin ultimately led to my interest in entrepreneurship. I don't think it wasthe other way around. I worked in an industry of very, very traditionalfinance. Very, very traditional financial reporting big public companies,things like that. And and it was pretty obvious to people in our industry, andI think it still is today, that like the way that financial markets are builtis pretty archaic.

Matthew: There's a lot of blindtrust placed into how companies report their numbers, their performance, theirannual filings. You know, obviously there's regulations and layers and auditorsand things like that. But there's still a lot of room for error. I mean, someof the, the, the case studies we studied in school were like the massivesystemic frauds of Enron and WorldCom and companies like that, that were likemassive failures in the way that our financial systems were built.

Matthew: Bitcoin caught myattention in that context. I mean, so this is 2012. My brother tells me aboutBitcoin. I start going into a rabbit hole. I ultimately didn't leave and startfocusing on Bitcoin professionally until 2014. While I was still working atDeloitte, I started pitching Bitcoin as the end all and be as like thisannoying employee who just like would not let the partners of the firm ignoreme on this topic.

Matthew: I was like, Hey, we'renot doing anything on Bitcoin. This is gonna be huge. And eventually they sortof let in and they let me go and explore the area. Yeah. I spent a year and ahalf in my last year and a half of Deloitte leading sort of a. Pretty broadBitcoin slash crypto research team. We went and, and sort of built a bunch ofprototypes.

Matthew: We, we, we used to gomeet with a bunch of startups. We went to a bunch of conferences. I think itwas in that year and a half that the, the concept of becoming an entrepreneurbecame a lot less scary to me because I started interacting with entrepreneurson a much more regular basis. And, and they didn't feel all that different thanme.

Matthew: They didn't feel likethey had some magic secret ingredient that I didn't. And so in that process, Ithink the, you know, the, the, the, the scary factor of, of sort of quittingyour job seemed less and less scary after a little while in that, in thatspace.  

Julian: Yeah. What, whatingredients did they have that, that you also had?

Matthew: I mean, frankly, Ithink I, I used to say this a lot in my first company. It, to me it was almosta naive stubbornness about what you were doing and what view you had, like whatperspective you had on the world. Most people that I came across in the cryptospace, myself included, we were, we had primarily one thing in common.

Matthew: We were young andinexperienced, right? So most of us were not even 30 years old. Most of us hadvery short careers, if any, careers at all, . And there was a, there was partof the reason that I think this industry attracted folks like that is becauseyou didn't have a deep understanding of like how the world works outside ofthis like new magic internet money industry.

Matthew: And so this was likethe first time you ever thought about money and finances and, and, andfinancial systems was in the context of crypto. And I think there's a certainamount of naive naiveness or naivete and, and an inexperienced that you need tobelieve that your crazy ideas are realistic. And like, if you're tooexperienced ideas that seem too far outta the box, just feel like they'recompletely unattainable and you don't even try.

Matthew: And I think, you know,young folks starting businesses that don't know the challenges and theobstacles they will run into are more likely to take the big risks because theydon't actually know what the risks are, right? So they're sort of blindly goinginto it. But then what happens is that once you run into that obstacle, ifyou're creative and resourceful and you surround yourself with intelligentpeople, you solve it and, and then you, then you get to the next obstacle andyou solve it.

Matthew: You sort of, the big,big hairy problem feels more and more solvable because you're just solving itone step at a time. Whereas the other sort of more experienced risk averseperson looks at the end goal and they're like, That's impossible. You can neverget there. So they don't even try. Right. So that to me was like, the biggesttakeaway is like, Hey, most of these people are like 24, 25 years old and I'venever had a job before.

Matthew: If they can do it, whycan't I do it? Right. So,  

Julian: Yeah. Has has cryptokind of turned out to be what maybe you thought it, it was going to be when youfirst started working on it? And, and if, and if so how, how, what was yourprediction? And if not how is it different?

Matthew: Yeah. I mean, yes andno. Like when I started paying attention to the space, Bitcoin was sort of theonly name in the only game in town.

Matthew: I think. I thinkBitcoin is very much on track to achieving its its promise. I think when theworld is going through the amount of turmoil that it's going through right now,as much as people like to throw stones at Bitcoin because it's got volatilemarket prices and you know, if you invested in Bitcoin six months ago, you'reprobably not doing so well right now. I think the, the underlying macro thesisof Bitcoin is proving itself in the way that the world is sort of transpiring,the world events are transpiring. I still think it's gonna take time for thatto really show up in people's lives, but I think like the macro thesis couldnot be more correct.

Matthew: Yeah, you know,Bitcoin was created again at a time when financial markets were imploding, whenthe world lost confidence in our banks. I think the first block in Bitcoin is abank going a bank going under, right? So I forget the exact headline from thatfirst block. And like, we're sort of seeing that all over again, right?

Matthew: So we're almostrefreshing our memories as to why Bitcoin was so important. So on that side, Icontinue to be super, super bullish on the broader themes of crypto andeverything else that's sort of come outta this industry. I think there's goodsand there's bads. I think, you know, frosty industries where money is comeseasily attract all sorts of different types of actors.

Matthew: And it's tough tostand out and do good things when you're surrounded by people that are therefor the wrong reasons. And and that's sort of what jaded me. I spent four yearsin that space. with my own business and maybe about a year and a half beforethat while I was still at Deloitte. And in the last year I really felt a sensethat like the, you know, the, the motivation that I felt going into theindustry had been like, sucked outta my sales.

Matthew: Yeah. I just couldn'tfind a clear path forward in terms of like what impact this was having, why thework we were doing mattered at all to regular people. Just felt like we wereplaying into the hands of speculators and sort of like gambling marketseffectively. I think there will be good coming outta this industry.

Matthew: I just think it takestime for, for those filters to sort of like filter the good from the bad.  

Julian: Yeah, Yeah. Before wemove into to Moves and what you're doing there, how long do you think all thatfiltering is going to take until we have adoptability and scalability? And alsohave it, have it really reach people who you know, are the average personrather than, you know, those who are doing it for a creative or, or, Our ourinvestment reasons or gambling reasons.

Julian: Yeah, just, I don'tknow if a ballpark figure but how many, how many years or months?  

Matthew: Yeah, I think, I thinkwe're, I think there are some real valuable things that have come out thisindustry already, that are already having an impact. And I, I can, I can talkto you about one of them in the context, the Moves, because sort of part of thestory of why we went, why I went from focusing on crypto to focusing on Moves.

Matthew: I'll, I'll sort of tryto paint that picture for you. So I do think that there are real. valuableexamples in the crypto industry today that are already starting to impactpeople's lives in meaningful ways. I mean, Bitcoin has its own stories. It hasits own sort of like relevance, especially in markets where you have extremelack of confidence in, in national currencies, in, in, in, in governments,fiscal policies, things like that.

Matthew: You know, maybe lessso in more established western countries like the US or Canada or WesternEurope, but I do think there are places in the world where Bitcoin is alreadyan, an incredibly powerful. Tool. And then in the rest of the crypto space,maybe broadly like the Web3 or the DeFi space, I think there's some earlyexamples.

Matthew: I mean, I think theyare all very early, over the next five to 10 years, I'd expect to see more ofthis play out at scale. You know, the markets, the, the market pressures thatwe're seeing right now in like traditional equity and debt markets. I thinkcrypto provides like an interesting alternative rail to some of those problems.

Matthew: How people get accessto mortgages, how people finance their cars. You know, et cetera, and, and it'sjust like there are companies now starting to bridge those gaps. There's somereally cool concepts. You know, part of the thing that got me excited aboutbuilding Moves around, like how do you build ownership or the concept analogousto ownership into regular, everyday consumer products.

Matthew: So there's some reallycool companies out there that I'm really inspired by. eco.com outta SiliconValley. Brain Trust. There's some yeah, Audi audience you know, some of thesecompanies that I think have, have built real things with real value for realcustomers, but they're still the exception.

Matthew: And so, you know,five, five more years, we'll see more of those 10 more years. I think it'llbecome the, the norm. But it's not gonna happen overnight.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Going toMoves. I know you mentioned that you started to pay attention to the gayeconomy and, and realized that there was a lot of problems that needed to besolved.

Julian: But what caught yourattention about the gay economy in particular while you were, you know,building in crypto and, and working within that space? You know, rather thandoing something kind of, I guess adjacent to that, you, you, you switched gearsinto something that I think a lot of people know about.

Julian: I know the gigeconomy, we, we, we see it physically. Whether we're ordering or whether we'reworking on the other side of the app. I've had the, the pleasure of doing both, you know, and, and it's been an interesting experience on both sides. Butwhat caught your attention to start working within the gay economy space, andwhat particular problems were you fascinated about that, that you wanted tostart working on?

Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I'll,same, same sort of thought as, as why I think young people and inexperiencedpeople are so good at becoming entrepreneurs. I feel the same way about like myinitial views on the gig economy. Were very naive and were very sort of likeunfounded, but I had this gut feeling that what I was learning in crypto, thisidea of sort of like democratized decentralized ownership could be applied toestablished and existing industries and particularly established industrieswhere they were very like tech enabled in tech first industries.

Matthew: Yeah. So, you know, ifI sort of really boil down, like what I think the takeaway of the crypto andWeb3 industry is, is this idea of like aligning economic incentives ofmulti-stakeholder platforms or ecosystems, right? Yeah. So, and the best placeI could sort of identify that outside of crypto was the gig economy.

Matthew: The gig economy isthis really interesting beast where you have customers ordering food andordering rides and, and needing TaskRabbit and da da da da. You've got workers.Enabling these services by providing their time and their skills. But you havesort of a misalignment of incentives. You got a group of capital providers andshareholders that fund companies like Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and others.

Matthew: And they take a lot ofthe lines, share the value out of those, those industries. And effectively, Imean, and, and not so they're not, not so they're criticism cuz I think this issort of a natural way that businesses operate. But they will pay gig workersexactly enough to keep them around, But no more.

Matthew: Right. So there's,there's no economic long term alignment or incentive for a gig worker to reallyfeel compelled to help grow the industry. And so my, my original questioncoming from like a, a crypto angle, and this is very much not what we'rebuilding as a business today yet. But my original question is like, Hey, whatwould the gig economy look like if gig workers owned it?

Matthew: Or at least if gigworkers owned a large portion of it. And how would we get there? Would we,would we get there by launching a competitor to Uber that happened to betokenized and, and you know, where you were handing out these like assets todrivers as they onboard it? Or could you sort of like Trojan horse yourselfinto the existing gig economy and find a way to like bring some of those, thoseconcepts to life?

Matthew: And so that's where westarted. We said, Hey, we wanna build a product for gig workers. That aspiresto give gig workers back or not back, give gig workers control and ownership inthe gig economy, how we get there, what products we need to build along theway. Like that sort of became cleared later, but that was the original lawthesis.

Julian: Yeah. What, tell us alittle bit about the traction, where, where is the product now and, and how isit starting to to answer those questions and to, you know, kind of completethe, the objective of like, you know, giving them the ownership or at leastpart ownership back in terms of whether it's their work or their skillset or,or kind of their activity and energy that they're spending on working and, andyou're right, it's this weird alignment of, of, you know, necessity.

Julian: And I think as youknow, Covid and, and. Just the world becomes a little bit more dispersed andthings are accessible by technology that it's gonna, you know, this ecosystemof gig working is just gonna become, you know, this, this ever expandingorganism. Yeah. So yeah. How are you enabling them to, to take that ownershipback?

Matthew: Good question. Andlike to give, to give sort of your listeners a sense of scale, like, depending onhow you measure the gig economy today. We're talking about on the low end, 20million on the high end, 50 to 60 million people in the US that definethemselves in some ways, gig workers. The reason that's such a broad range isbecause lots of people have different definitions for the word gig work, right?

Matthew: So if you're afreelancer online, you might think of yourself as a gig worker. You might not.If you drive for Uber, it's pretty clear you're a gig worker if you deliver forDoorDash, but there's some sort of blurrier ones in the middle. So it is amassive segment of the labor market and growing over the last 10 years.

Matthew: Even if you take outCovid from the equation, it had been consistently growing over that period oftime. Covid was this like, you know, supercharged growth in the gig economybecause people all of a sudden couldn't go to the grocery store, they couldn'tgo to restaurants. So they started using these services a lot more.

Matthew: I think we'll start tonormalize a little bit now that Covid has started behind us. Maybe, maybethere's some new consumer behaviors that have been sort of entrenched, like howfrequently we are around DoorDash every week. But but generally speaking, Ithink this is gonna continue to be a large segment of the labor market.

Matthew: Why that matters isthis is a segment of the labor market that interacts with their, you know,employer in a completely different way. They are not employed by thesecompanies. They don't get, they don't get access to any type of safety netbenefits, insurance or, or generally like employee protections, right?

Matthew: So if you think of a,of a company with a workforce, They generally have an HR department. They careabout your wellbeing, they care about your mental health. They care about your,you know, are you saving for retirement, all these things. Or in some context,there's a union playing that role. You know, if you're like in a, in a moretraditional unionized industry, gig workers sort of fall in the cracks.

Matthew: They have no onelooking out for their interests. Most of them also don't just work for onecompany. They don't just drive for Uber. They drive for Uber and for Lyft, orthey do DoorDash and GrubHub, or they're spreading their time. So that was likethe original Observ. We said, Hey, that's gonna create a huge mess.

Matthew: When you startthinking about, Hey, 20, 30, 40 years from now, these people need to retire.Their kids need to have funded educations. They need to make sure they've gotmedical insurance in case they get sick. None of those things are being thoughtof today, right? So these people are operating on like, you know, a day by daybasis to like pay their gas and buy their groceries.

Matthew: Nobody's helping themplan for the long term. You know, as much as it matters to the individual gigworker, it's like this big systemic question for the economy. Say, fast forward20 years, what happens when 50 million people don't have a safety net? You endup with this massive cost on the overall American economy, right?

Matthew: So that's where wedecided to focus. Say, hey, like how do, how do we build a safety net aroundgig workers? And then in the process of building that safety net, how can weelevate them to being blast of a commoditized labor and more of like aparticipant in the economics of the gig economy. Right. So yeah, to give you areal simple sense of like what our product is today, we're threefold.

Matthew: One, we're a bankaccount, so we offer pe, we offer full service banking to gig workers. Theymove their direct deposits from any app that they work on. We support 19 appstoday, most of our customers are on two to three apps in a given a week. Somecustomers as many as 15 apps, some as few as one but they, you know, theirdeposits come into their Moves bank account.

Matthew: Within that, we alsogive them access to credit. They, they generally have a hard time gettingaccess to credit through traditional banks, but we understand their incomereally well. We see how consistently they've earned historically, and so thatunlocks a certain credit product for our customers. And then thirdly we builtout this reward program that is sort of the first part of this ownershipthesis.

Matthew: Where we give gigworkers fractional stock in the companies that they work for. So easiest way toexplain that is like a DoorDash worker getting access to dash DoorDash stockevery time they use their Moves account. Every time they refer a friend, everytime they do effectively do their daily work.

Matthew: They're earning smallamounts of DoorDash stock, and if they drive for Uber, they're earning smallamounts of Uber stock. And so that, that today is an exist. It's a liveexisting program. Eventually we'd like to scale that up to be sort of the,probably like the front end of our pitch. Right now, the front end of our pitchhas to do more with banking and ca and credit.

Matthew: Eventually, we'd likeit to be more of like, we call this part of our strategy the Moves collective,saying, Hey, like, join Loose Collective. There's power in numbers. You mightonly own one stock and Uber, but we've got a million other customers who alsoown one stock and Uber. So we can collectively influence Uber to make decisionsthat benefit us, right?

Matthew: Yeah. So we wanna sortof play. Dual role of not only being like a financial services company, butalso like a shareholder activist where we're out advocating for these issues ontheir behalf.

Julian: Yeah. And that'sfantastic. And there's so many questions that come to mind. With what, withwhat you're working on one being with, you know, the with application andeverything that you're working on, how were you able to build around the gigworker needs?

Julian: What was that buildingprocess like to give you the insight on, on what to focus on?

Matthew: Yeah. I mean,initially, and, and to give you a sense, I started the business in February of2020. The first month we're like, Oh, let's just get into a, as many Uber carsand, and order food and just talk to as many gig workers as possible.

Matthew: We walked around onthe streets in Toronto. Talked to people standing in line waiting for deliverypickups, his DoorDash queries, got into the back of Ubers just talking to gigworkers. The pandemic hit in March. So that derailed a lot of our ability to dothat the same way we were before, but we still found sort of creative ways justto, to get in front of gig workers.

Matthew: It turned into likeinviting people to like paid Zoom interviews where we would pay you 50 bucks tocome talk to our team and just tell us about your day. Tell us about what'sfrustrating. Tell us about how you manage your money, et c. Frankly, it wasthrough those conversations that the like obvious pain points started toappear.

Matthew: So one of the mostobvious that I didn't appreciate going into this was that your average gigworker, as I said, works for more than one app, and your average app requiresyou to use a specific banking product to earn your pay on that app. So if youdrive for. The average Uber driver uses an Uber debit card to earn their Uberpay.

Matthew: They're not requiredto, but most of them do. And then most of them sort of go down this path wherethey're like incentivized to use this Uber debit card. Lyft has one. goPuff isrolling one out. Amazon has one. DoorDash has one. Instacarts rolling one out,et cetera. So what that meant is if you were working on two, three apps, it wasnot uncommon for you to have two, three different banking cards in your walletearning like a third of your income here, a third of your income there, a thirdof your income here.

Matthew: Just like startingpoint was like a really stupid way to manage your money. Like you need to payyour rent out of a single account, but you got money in three differentaccounts for no reason. And so we're like, Okay, well can we consolidate thatinto a single product? There was no app in market.

Matthew: Banking app that waslike a direct to consumer banking product that was not branded by Uber, Lyft,DoorDash, GrubHub, whatever. So we're like, Hey, we wanna be the, in thestandalone brand for gig workers, and we don't care where your income comesfrom. We don't care if you used to work for Uber and now you work for Lyft andnext week you work for DoorDash.

Matthew: Like it doesn't matterto us, but it does matter if you use these other banking cards. So that wassort of step one. Yeah. And then we, we sort of went further and further fromthere. And the more we talked to customers, the more they told us about other problemsthey had, and that sort of like laid out a.

Julian: Yeah. What youmentioned this idea about credit and building credit and I, I had anotherfounder who's doing who's helping others build credit in creative ways. Forinstance, they were doing as subscriptions and adding that as a way to inputthat data into the, the the federal credit system.

Julian: How. Are, are youdoing something similar in terms of just, you know, inputting data? Are youkind of having your own credit score system that you've built internally? Whatdoes that look like? Because I, I think first of all, credit is just it's sohard if you don't have access to it to then get access.

Julian: And then once you, ifyou have any say any infraction, it's so hard to rebuild that score and, andkind of reestablish a reputation. What are you doing and how are you usingcredit in a creative way? That that we haven't seen with within the gig. .  

Matthew: Yeah. So, so right nowit's pretty simple. We offer our own credit product based on our own internalrisk sort of score.

Matthew: Yeah. So we don't lookat your credit score and we're not helping you get access to credit productselsewhere. What that does mean though, that it's limited, like all we're ableto do is we do advances from $25 to a thousand dollars. Mm-hmm. A thousanddollars advance in the context of a gig worker can be a significant amount ofmoney.

Matthew: I mean, The use casethat we were originally most interested in was during Covid. People had theselike big gaps and interruptions in their pay because they had to like isolateat home if they got exposed to Covid or something like that. We're like, Well,what does a person do if they're forced to stay home, but they can't earn moneythat week because they need to get in their car to earn money.

Matthew: So we wanted ouradvance to be like, Hey, we'll be the bridge. We'll be this like backup cashadvance in case you end up in one of these scenarios. So we found people usingit for like self isolation, people using it because their car broke down and itwas in the garage for a couple days, so they couldn't be on the road.

Matthew: But that's only acertain segment of problems, right? Like those problems up to a thousanddollars. There's a lot of problems there in your sort of weekly, monthlyschedule. And we can do that very well with very managed risk. And we don'tlook at your credit score and we don't report to the credit bureaus, and wedon't send you to a collection agency if you don't repay us.

Matthew: Like it's all sort ofmanaged inside the product. Where we'd like to get to is we'd like to be ableto unlock more credit product. Either ourselves or allowing you to get accessto credit products by improving your credit score eventually. So we have lookedat things like credit building. We don't do anything that interacts with thecredit bureaus, but I think there's probably a short term plan to do that.

Matthew: We're talking aboutsomething in 2023 that might unlock like a new feature set around credit building.But I think we first wanted better understand like, Hey, where's it most beingused? Some of the problems we ran that we, we experienced with our customerswere like really, really obvious low hanging fruits.

Matthew: Like it's rarely.someone trying to get approved for a mortgage, which is a big credit problem.Yeah. But it's often somebody wanting to prove to their landlord how much moneythey make to be allowed to get a lease. And like that's a really simple problemto solve. If you've got all of their earnings data and all of their sort oflike income profiles, then we can give a landlord confidence of their income ina way that an Uber driver would've a hard time doing.

Matthew: Cuz like what we werehearing a lot is like, oh, I take a screenshot of my Uber app, my DoorDash app,and. I send these and like landlords are looking at this saying, Hey, I don't,I don't know if this person sort of has consistent income, but we could showthat over a year, two years, five years, you've had extremely consistent incomeand sort of give that to you as like a tool to be able to unlock a lease, forexample.

Julian: But yeah. Yeah.Incredible. What are some of the biggest risks that Moves faces today?  

Matthew: I mean, like with anystartup we're, it's a balance between like how much does it cost? To deliverour product to our customers and what's our revenue potential on that customer?So, yeah. You know, broadly speaking, I'd say that that's as true for us as itis for any relatively early stage company where we're still ironing out kinksin our business model.

Matthew: We're still trying tomake sure that the business operates as optimally as possible. I mean, to giveyou a sense, we've got, you know, 20, 30,000 customers using the app. We, weneed that to eventually become sort of, this is a market of millions ofcustomers, but a lot of it is tied to like unlocking new capital from venturecapital investors.

Matthew: Mm-hmm. . And to getto that next round of venture capital you need to be able to prove that themetrics in your business and the unit economics are sort of trending in theright direction. So financial services is a complicated space. I think.Twofold. I'm glad I came into this industry with no prior knowledge because itforced me to think about problems from first principles.

Matthew: But there's also a lotof stuff that you take for granted, but is actually really complicated underthe hood of how a debit card works, how payment rails work, how payroll works,and like we've had to effectively learn how all this stuff works so that wecould build a product that actually has a chance of being economically viable.

Matthew: So that's probably thebiggest thing as we think about our business.

Julian: Yeah. If everythinggoes well, What's the long-term vision for Moves?  

Matthew: I mean, I, I have iton my wall just to, as, as like an anchor. I, we have this like sort of companydeclaration we call it, and it's, and the title is a hundred million gigworkers later.

Matthew: And, and a, you know,I think that's, that's really the aspiration we see ourselves. Solving aproblem that's not just American, not just North American, but, but global.What, what I would love to see is that this concept that we call the Movescollective becomes sort of synonymous with the gig economy.

Matthew: You know, the same waythat, I mean, you live in West Hollywood, so this, you might be familiar withthis. I mean, I always use a silly example of like, Hey, if you wanna be anactor, you gotta join the Actor's Guild. If you wanna be a gig worker, you'regonna have to be a part of the Moose Collective.

Matthew: And, and, and beingpart of the Moose Collective is gonna be this like, entry point into the gigeconomy. It's gonna be where you get your safety net. It's gonna be where youget your pay, it's gonna be where how you manage your benefits and your, your,your insurance. And it's gonna be how you earn ownership in these companies asyou work for.

Matthew: And that part is likea little bit more like analogous to maybe like a stock option plan if you werea traditional employee. So that's the aspiration. I mean, we've got a long wayto go in the us you know, in the next three, four years. We've got our eyes on,on, on a million customers, probably three years would be like the righttimeframe.

Matthew: And then from there, Ithink the sky's still  

Julian: in it. . Yeah. Nowit's incredible. And, and I'm, I'm so excited about not only you, but othercompanies similar to you who are offering different incentives to those who areusing their application, their technology. Not only do you enable them to dotheir, their normal job more easily and effectively, but you also are rewardingthem with the stock options that you mentioned to further encourage theirownership of their work.

Julian: And, and I'm excitedto see where, where Moves is gonna go and, and in the direction. And I alwayslike to, Question from our founders that are on the, the show to kind of notonly do some selfish research, but also to to give the audience more researchto do themselves. But I always like to ask, you know, what, what books orpeople have influenced you the most throughout now or, or in your career?

Matthew: Yeah. Books, well, onevery specifically relevant to, to sort of our thesis as a business, a book thatI read a couple of years ago called The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder.Really, really fascinating. Sort of dive into what happens when employees startbuying shares in the companies that they work for.

Matthew: What changes in thedynamic between management and employee that set out a lot of our thesis? Solove, love that book. It's not really about the gig economy, it's more aboutlike, you know, what happens when every Walmart employee decides they wanna bea Walmart shareholder and like, what changes? And so there's some really coolideas that came out of that.

Matthew: People. I'll say I'vebeen pretty inspired by, there's one specific venture capitalist in, in theWeb3 crypto space, Jesse Walden who, who I, I follow his, his writing and histhinking A lot. Jesse talks about the ownership economy, how sort of the futureis built on sort of tokenized ownership models.

Matthew: And, and I thinkthere's just a lot of really cool opportunities to really expand on that, onthat idea in various industries. And I hope ours is one of them.  

Julian: Incredible. Well,Matt, thank you so much. I know we're at time and, and we could talk for I'msure another 30 minutes, if not more. But I'm excited not only where, whereMoves is, is at now, but where it's, you know, the future's headed and thesuccess and congrats on, on the current success.

Julian: And best of luck on onfuture success as well. But last little bit. I always like to give our founderstime to give, give their plugs. Where, where can we support the idea? Where canwe be part of the mo the Moves collective? Give us your LinkedIns, yourwebsites, your Twitters. Where can we find you and support?

Matthew: Yeah, I mean, check usout movesfinancial.com. Pretty straightforward how you'd spell that. And thenyou can follow me on Twitter @mattspoke, M A t t s p O K E talk a lot aboutwhat we're doing as a business, as well as some other stuff. So I'd love tofind you there.  

Julian: Awesome. Well, Matt,again, thank you so much for joining the show and I hope you enjoyed yourself.

Matthew: Thanks, Julian. Loveit.

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