Julian: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the behind the company lines podcast. I'm here with Sahi Hassan CEO at dots. Dots is a drop in payments for developers. He's gonna dive into more on, on what that means and, and what they're doing and, and how they're progressing and in their, in their space.

And so Hassan, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to chat with you and learn a little bit more about you and your background. And honestly, just to jump in, what were you doing before you started. 

Sahil: Yeah, thanks for having me before I started dots, actually, I was just an engineer on like a really, really early stage project at Google research.

It was some of it's still covered by NDA, so I'll be a little cage about some details there. Sure. But basically was working on Google has very large data centers. Mm-hmm and a lot of things go into maintaining a data center, but one of them. That you need to go and get a bunch of atomic clocks so that computers can actually tell time and no relative time to one another.

And so I was actually working on [00:01:00] a project that basically made it so that all of these data centers wouldn't actually need to ever touch any clock at all, to have a relative positioning of time from one to the. 

Julian: That's awesome. So what, what goes into that process? Is it like a certain kind of system or algorithm?

Is it something that's cookie cutter or something that you have to build 

Sahil: yourself? Way more something you have to build yourself? No one's ever figured this out before. It was actually based on the guy who hired me's old PhD thesis from like 30 years ago. Okay. So it's, it's some custom hardware it's custom algorithms.

I wrote like a entire like data center physics kind of mod. simulator sort of system from scratch, like actually three separate times in two different programming languages, just to keep iterating on like our understanding of the problem. It's actually very uncharted territory. So not unlike a startup at yeah.

Julian: Yeah. What, what, what what, what is the problem if you were to kind of conceptualize it for, for our audience? 

Sahil: [00:02:00] Sure. So. We as humans look at clocks to tell time or the sun or whatever kind of thing you would like to use as an analogy for how we estimate time. Computers don't really have that nor does the human concept of time particularly matter, right?

Like it, beyond us being able to see that it's 12:00 PM on a computer, we don't actually care as long as things are processed in the order that they're received. And so. It turns out that if you're particularly clever with how computers communicate with each other and the rate at which they process information, you can ensure that they all basically do one instructions worth of information at the same time at a human scale.

So like you can basically the real, this all sounds really complex, but the real world application for this is. if you're familiar with the stock market, right? Mm-hmm, , there's huge amounts of money being put into like buying a building in New Jersey so that you have like [00:03:00] really, really fast internet into the making stock trades.

And that's the whole concept of high frequency trading and stuff like that. If you go build a system where the first query to hit the system is the first query processed. You basically can build like purely equitable stock markets. another applications like video games. You can actually build open world video games where mm-hmm the world itself is like directly laid on top of a data center.

So this server just processes, this area's worth of information. And because the communication is, you know what time it's received and what time it should be processed. Every other node within that system is also capable of just operating in silos. So it's like a very complex problem, but it really boils down.

Can you convince computers to not look at human clocks to figure out what 

Julian: time it's. Wow. So what's with the application and you mentioned real world gaming but what other applications and, and stock trading as well, but what other applications [00:04:00] would this influence and is there anything like it right now or is this all kind of underdevelopment?

Sahil: It's all kind of under development. Yeah, there's, there's some very early stage iterations of this in the startup world. There's actually a company. Name I'm a little bit blanking out on that partnered with Eve online to kind of do exactly what I was talking about on the video game side of things.

Mm-hmm for a particular event that they were doing. I would say like, realistically I'm, I'm speaking of this, but like it's probably three to five years at best removed from touching anything regular people would run into. Yeah, 

Julian: yeah. That, that that's fascinating. And, and it'll interests me on how it will be.

It seems like it'll be extremely applicable to, you know, anything we do virtually like in the metaverse as, as you know, that kind of yeah. System kind of, you know, builds out and, and we're able to have these conversations, but with, you know, either glasses or some kind of hologram, you know, and, and some kind of ability there.

But shifting gears here to dots is this. [00:05:00] Influenced your, your experience at dots, or did the idea come out of a different a different you know, experience where, where did dots come from out of this? Because right now I don't see the connection. yeah. 

Sahil: It's, it's a good point. It's quite a big jump from like, Hey, here's this guy that's just working on algorithms for data centers to, oh, he's now like a FinTech founder tackling somewhat difficult problems of money movement.

 Yes and no. Like I think what research really confirmed for me was I'm not really a person that cares particularly about one single field. I think every field is equally interesting and all of them have difficult problems. My golden life is really to throw myself at as many of these difficult problems as I can, because that's just where I have fun.

And so what dots really started off as. funnily enough was like a micro transaction platform where my co-founder and I we're we're old friends. We used to work at Google [00:06:00] X together. He really wanted to donate like 20 cents to like talkers. He found funny or like Twitter folks that he found it.

Funny, kind of, this was a little bit before DeFi was as much of a term thrown about and web three, hadn't had the resurgence that it's had today. And so we were still very much thinking in the web two kind of paradigm around this. And he was like, you know, it's just really annoying, cuz I don't want to subscribe to this person.

I don't care for all of their content, but that video made me laugh and I'll pay 'em 20, 20 cents. Cuz it made me laugh. Mm-hmm and so that's actually weirdly enough how dot started. He sold me on the idea. We decided we were gonna form a company suddenly a week later we were in Y Combinator. Kind of blinking our eyes at how fast life was really kind of approaching us.

And it's really funny cuz the first thing that we heard in YC, we had office hours with the partner that led us in, was like, look, micro [00:07:00] transactions are cool. We've let a, a few micro transaction companies into YC. You are probably going to die. So at least make sure you die in an interesting way. And I was like, all right, well, that's depressing four days after you let us in, but, okay.

And I think we, we really stuck through micro transactions for about a month, a month and a half. And we started to see the exact problems that he had warned us about, where it takes a lot of consumer education. Like I'm sure. Even you in the back of your mind, Julian, until I started giving practical examples were like, what exactly are my car transactions?

And so we started running into that problem over and over again, people weren't that interested, but what we had built was a way to withdraw your money to your bank account or withdraw your money to your PayPal or to your Venmo. And what ended up happening is a lot of folks that we were talking to would spend like, you know, how.

Whenever you have a sales call. Usually the first five-ish [00:08:00] minutes of that sales call is just you trying to get to know the other person. Like you're just talking about things in the larger scheme of things are relatively meaningless, but you're trying to build a rapport in those five minutes, time and time again, people were complaining about payouts or like, Hey, we have this like gig driver who just refuses to give us their bank account.

And we just, I like get up every Tuesday morning and I Venmo him because that's just the only life option I have. And I was like, oh, I mean, RPA API, lets you just pay people to Venmo if you want to do it. And we had a product hunt launch coming up that we were going to, it was the last ditch effort for micro transaction.

Let's see if we can make it happen. Yeah. And we made the decision like a day before. No, you know what? We're gonna become a payouts company. We're just gonna strip out all of the micro transaction stuff. Yeah. We're just gonna focus on helping businesses pay non W2 employees. So like 10 99 contractors, gig workers.

Creators, you know, you name it, we've now helped pay them at, at our current stage. And so [00:09:00] that's how dots in its current exception kind of came to be. That was over a year ago, we just sort of made the decision that, you know, if anyone spends five minutes of their life complaining to people, they've never heard of that.

This is a problem. And we've already built the code that kind of solves it. We might as well just double down. Made that first product on launch and just never look back. 

Julian: I love that. I, I love stories where, you know, founders kind of take in the, the customer experience and find creative ways to solve problems that, you know, are either obvious or at least, you know, ones that, that connect amongst customers, because there's just so much.

Substance in understanding your customer and maybe your first product isn't, isn't the right one, or isn't the one that's gonna be the most effective, but how that product might be able to mold into a, a solution that does fit them is I think the, the, the piece that makes founders different it's not, you know, banging your head against the wall unless it's necess.

But it's, it's not banging your head against the wall until you see kind of an opening, a [00:10:00] crack through, and you can find, find a way to you know, really attack neither the problem or the, the consumers life cycle, or what have you tell us a little bit more about the traction. So you're now you're working with a bunch of companies helping them pay out their workers and working on assuming with a bunch of different payment platforms where, where is dos now in, in in its 

Sahil: absolutely.

So the product itself's about a year old there's a lot of fun stories there. Our first customer became our first hire and a whole bunch of other weird stuff has happened in the middle. But we've really kind of focused on the idea of, I guess, two really separate ideas. The first is building modular building blocks for people to build on.

I think the thing that we saw missing in the. Today was a lot of the financial providers, whether it's your banking as a service guys, Stripe, you name it. Anyone you can think of, they tend to want to build walled gardens. They tend to want you to just solely exist in their ecosystem, have everything there.

And if it [00:11:00] doesn't exist there, tough look. Yeah. We kind of have the opposite ethos where our logic has always been. Hey, we built a whole bunch of cool. Your probably only care about like one, maybe two of those cool things, but we built six of them. So we'd rather build our infrastructure where it works closer to like silly putty or playdo like, you can wrap it around and use it to plug whatever gaps you need plugged rather than doing that.

So that's kind of the first philosophy. The second is just one API for any payment rail you could ever. Really simple ethos, a lot harder to pull off in practice, unfortunately. . Yeah. But we have, I think probably north of 10 plus payment rails domestically in the us, you know, we can push money to Z cash app.

FMO PayPal, Amazon gift cards, prepaid debit cards, ACH, RTP, basically anything you can think of. And we're starting to expand internationally traction wise, you know, I think we're at kind of, we've done over 60,000 [00:12:00] payments, total transactions total today. We're, we're growing, I think on average, 40, 50% month over month over the last four months, which has been really exciting.

And our customers, you know, I think maybe this is different than a lot of other folks that you've talked to. It's just a very horizontal space. Mm-hmm . Where we have, you know, the more traditional gig economy companies come in on our platform. You know, there's a company out in Ohio called cooking genie that lets you rent kind of a chef to come into your house and cook meals for you.

Super cool. Right. They use us to power payments to their genies, what they call their chefs. Then like, kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum. We have another customer. Who's maybe my favorite customer though. This is public. So maybe I shouldn't have said that. But it's a, it's a company called don't tell comedy.

I think they've been around since 20 17, 20 18 good amount of TikTok following. Yeah, they do like secret comedy shows throughout the us, and they use us to pay their comedians. They use us to pay their [00:13:00] producers for all of these. Like just directed their Venmo stuff like that. Mm-hmm and like, this was a, a world where a lot of these comedians before us, one of two things happened either the producer was given a lump sum of cash and the hope was like, Hey, they're probably a good person.

They'll probably pay the comedians with their owed. Or you had to like mail each comedian, a check, which is just not how the world should work in 2020. And then kind of going off into an entirely third example, we have just started to partner with one of the biggest personal injury law firms in the United States to handle payouts for personal injury cases winnings.

I don't know what the right term there would you receive if you win a personal injury lawsuit. So like it is just a ridiculously horizontal space. We end up talking to a lot of cool companies just because of that modular ethos. We can kind of plug and play in so many different ways that someone always finds what they want 

Julian: in us.

Mm-hmm is, is, is plugging and play in this kind of modular [00:14:00] you know, environment. Is that be, is that due to the technology you built in? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And, and as you're plugging in and moving to different companies, how, how much work goes into you? Customizing it for each company and consumer you work with because a law firm's different from a gay economy versus a, a a comedy.

What would you call that a comedy institution? I don't know. I don't know what you'd call comedy networks. 

Sahil: Comedy network. Yeah, honestly, I think they've built their own category, which is awesome. No idea. Yeah, I'll let you know if I ever, if they ever give me the right terminology on how to refer to 

Julian: them.

Yeah. Yeah. But what, what, what, what work goes into making those, those site adjustments? Because, you know, we think of, or at least I think of technology as very linear, you know, there are certain versions and iterations of it over time. But I think a lot more companies are using this customizable approach as they progress and as they grow.

And so it seems way more dynamic than a linear approach. Hey, yeah. What goes into that? . 

Sahil: Yeah. [00:15:00] So this is, it's almost a bit of a philosophical question as well as is like a practical one. Yeah. Right. Every, everyone has their ideal world, but, and, and whenever you have these sales calls and I'm sure you'll relate to, they will just tell you, this is my ideal world.

Can you make it happen? But. Half of those bullet points are things they don't actually care about just are marginally convenient. Sure. And so obviously, you know, for personal injury for that law firm, like we had to build something very, very custom. There's very strict rules on how that money can move.

And if you screw up the attorneys themselves get disbarred and you know, we're not particularly in the business of ruining people's live. So like in circumstances like that, we're just very willing to go and get into the nitty gritty and allow for more flexibility. I think that the key point here is if there's something where it's like, okay, this is a nice tab, not a need to have.

We just fundamentally, we are still, you know, a relatively [00:16:00] small seed stage company. It's going to be lower in the priority queue and we'll get to it soon, but not immediate. , but for each of, kind of these customers where it's the law firm or for cooking genie, we had to do some very specific KYC kind of customization there.

If it's something where we're clearly like this helps the modularity of our product. This allows us to make sure we serve kind of this customer base that has this unmet need. And it's clear that these features must hit. Needs, I think we've built an org from day one that doesn't view technology as like a linear path.

It views it as these are priorities. This will make these people happy. And I will take on the ownership to make sure this gets done right. Like the entire flow for the law firm, which was basically for all intent and purposes, an entirely separate product. Yeah. Like we wrote two different. We went found two new providers and wrote integrations with them and [00:17:00] customized the, the funds flow just for this law firm.

Our, we had one of our developers, the first customer I referred to earlier it took him a week and a half. Like he just decided that this was important. He was alone on the project and he just, he banged it out. Wow. And I think that's really kind of the philosophy that we've had is if, if you can convince us it's I.

It's important and it'll be done. 

Julian: I love that is, is now I'm assuming, you know, once you kind of create a product for this certain category industry, is this kind of what you, you feel is going to grow that category? So now that you've done one law firm and, and understand the components that are necessary, both for compliance and for legal sake, now you can maybe potentially grow that that funnel 

Sahil: of, of business.

Yeah. I mean, we'll probably give it a couple months just to be very sure. Sure. But. or once we're very confident that we've we've done everything correctly. Absolutely. And I think not only that, but [00:18:00] this is kind of what I was alluding to when I said it was a philosophical discussion mm-hmm because we placed such a high emphasis on modularity.

Some of the connections that we built just for this law firm are now independent, modular pieces. We can offer separately to everything else. And so it's, it's really nice because it's almost. I, I guess the best analogy I can draw is like, it's almost like playing Pokemon. Like you're just like, yeah. I had to catch two more to be like, whatever leader I'm running against, but now these guys just are useful forever.

Yeah. 

Julian: Yeah. With, with, you know, I, I I'm from, from a lot of you know, startup philosophy, it's always like focus on one product or one core you know, you one core product and one core customer at a time, but you're, you're. From what I'm hearing, taking a different approach. Where do you see, like in terms of growth, is it gonna be difficult to focus in one direction and grow, or do you see the expansion of horizontally as your path to growth and the application of your product kind of, as it excels and, and, you know [00:19:00] and you kind of get more customers, where do you see that?

Cuz I know it's, it's kind of against the, the typical. 

Sahil: it is, and it isn't right. Yes. I, you know, that, that typical philosophy is, you know, YC like written in stone, as you walk into the building, it's a commander, like it's that level, like a niche win in the niche. Don't go outside the niche until you're really sure you want in that niche.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I totally agree with that philosophy. I think we just had a different spin on it, which is pick a. Mm, like, don't, don't worry about an industry per se, but like everyone has this problem, right? Everyone is unhappy to a certain extent with using their banking as a service or to a certain extent, not being able to pay out people with Venmo or have to do it by themselves.

Right. I mean, Ubers dealt with it, Lyfts dealt with it. And if those guys run into those problems, everyone. Right. And Airbnb [00:20:00] dealt with it so much that they went and got like a money transmitter licensed by themselves just so they could move money. However they needed to cuz they were like, all right, forget this.

We're just gonna do this ourselves. Right. And so when it's this big of a problem yes. At surface level, especially when you're a seed stage company, a lot of these customers seem eclectic and unfocused and, and maybe make you go like, are you really focusing on a. But I think at a macro scale, what we're really just saying is like, here's this like almost null zone where all the existing solutions dare not enter right now.

Mm-hmm because they're trying to be walled gardens mm-hmm . And if you can be the guy in the middle, that's just built a system that doesn't care about being a walled garden just wants to be in the, yeah. There's a lot of power in that, but as like, again, all good things like anyone can make it sound like.

Sons and daisies all the time, but like, you know, there do come natural expansion issues with that where yes, we can pursue law [00:21:00] firms, but that isn't going to be our so sole focus. Sure. We'll also be going after gig companies and marketplace companies, but, you know, I think part of being a good founder is also having the ego of I'll do it anyway.

Even if someone says no, right. And then we'll figure it out. So yeah, that, that's kind of our philosophy around it. I. the primary goal here is just to figure out where are these underserved null spaces? Where can we make lives? Just a 10 X, a hundred X better. Mm-hmm and just hammer our way through as many of them as we humanly can.

Yeah, I love that. It's 

Julian: like, it's like your, your product is growing in levels and each level gives you a different attribute and different skill. And only using that example, cuz you brought a Pokemon and I'm thinking about like, you know, in terms of a typical RPG, you know, what is your character and the ability kind of grow.

And it's awesome to see that you're focusing. Add it from a problem perspective versus, you know, a problem in a certain industry. Because I think like you're, you're right. So many people deal with this, [00:22:00] this issue of paying whether it's workers, whether it's employees. I mean, it's all, it's all, you know, employees and workers at at every level or I guess, and for the law firm, it's, it's whoever won at the case, right.

You're still a customer. What are some of the risks then that, that you're facing now? 

Sahil: Yeah, it's a great question. it's a couple, I mean, there is a reason that niche advice is so widespread, right? It would be downright hubris to not admit that to yourself, which is split focus just means two things, right?

One, if you can build the team that can maintain it, which so far knock on wood we have, but we have to be able to scale that up as well. Right. Mm-hmm so like a team of five that can split focus and run independently and get the job. is great and give, puts us in a really powerful position today. If tomorrow, you know, IRA is we raise an a and we're scaling up, maintaining that ethos in a team of 20 will be harder getting the [00:23:00] talent that can maintain that in a team of 20 will be harder.

And there is fundamentally like just math says that at some point we will not be able to sustain that. And the question is, can we grow. mm-hmm, in the business side of things without having to grow the headcount side of things, to a point where that's unsustainable and that's a, a bit of a thin line that we just need to make sure we're all always on the right side of.

Yeah. And then I think that the other biggest risk is just the idea that while what we're doing with payout is, is really clever and very cool and very modular. And I don't think this is like an existential risk to the company, but we'll just find that one of our modular pieces is even more important than payouts mm-hmm and we'll start to double down on that even more than we are doing now.

Yeah, right. Again, I think we built a company from the ground up where that second risk is more of like a, okay, let's go do that instead. Sure. Than anything else. I think the first one is the one that's kind of more [00:24:00] consistently top of mind of like making sure we maintain. the ability to split focus without actually being detrimental to the company.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And you, you mentioned earlier in terms of expansion internationally, you mentioned some web three being, you know, an ecosystem where, you know, payments are allowed and now that it's centralized and can communicate internationally as well versus domestically, what's the long term plan and vision for.as.

You know, you look for international expansion, obviously web three, can't be ignored in, in, in crypto payments. You know, my company, we pay out our developers in crypto, which is a huge benefit to them. But where do you see dots at, in, in terms of the long term success of the company? 

Sahil: Absolutely. I think twofold.

I'm just gonna keep hammering it on the modularity side of things. It's, it's just, if we do our job, right, it will always be a place where you can pick and choose exactly what. And, and the longer term thing is when I say we want to be one API for every rail. I mean, literally every rail, like I [00:25:00] want it to get to a point where if you want to like send hard cash to someone living in the middle of the Sahara, we're still able to do it by API.

Right. Obviously that's very aspirational and who knows if we'll ever get there, but at its core, what we really do appreciate is that. Crypto is not going away. And there will be an ever increasing percentage of folks that are just die hard believers mm-hmm and we want to make sure we can cater to them the same as we cater to everyone.

Who's, you know, decides to live their life out of their Venmo balance or whatever other aspect people may appreciate. And so for us, you know, we're moving internationally. We, we already move, I think, tens of thousands of dollars a month overseas, it's only poised to. Over the next few months. We want that to look like international wires.

We want that to look like local bank transfers in each of those hotspot countries. And as soon as someone goes and knocks on our door asking for it, we want it to look like [00:26:00] crypto transfers there too. Yeah. I think the major ethos here, or like the major plan here is whatever rail there is. We should find a way to connect to it and we should make it look ridiculously seamless.

Yeah, 

Julian: I, I that's awesome. And, and do you think you think, you know, crypto and, and just like how it's fundamentally built, will that make it easier or is it just another, you know, another type of, type of route to connect to not too dissimilar from 

Sahil: others? Yeah. I think part of the. part of the downside maybe of, of getting into a business like this self is you learn pretty quickly never to pick favorites.

Yeah. Because you want all, you need to get all of those rails and you don't want to be particularly emotionally tied to any of them. But you know, some of my best friends in college were actually the originators of Dows back in like 20, 15 to 2017. So I've been very plugged into this ecosystem for a while.

I. , I don't know that it will ever be a primary source. I don't know how much of the [00:27:00] rest of the world will embrace crypto if at all. I think with how the EU is generally around technology. Sure. I'm going to guess that one's probably not gonna pan out. Yeah. So I think crypto will be really, really good for certain countries and certain demographics mm-hmm and it will be relatively unused for at least the next five years for everybody else.

Hmm. And we want to make sure, you know, in the demographics that love it, you know, we're the best crypto payout provider they could ever want. And in the demographics that don't, we wanna make sure that we're meeting their needs as well. Yeah. Yeah, 

Julian: man, I think we could talk about the implications of payments.

I think all day, especially with, with how much, you know, you, how many people have this problem. The ability to solve the different use cases and, and ways to, you know, effectively help companies and businesses and individuals. It sounds like as well in terms of like law firms. And I'm sure there's, there's examples of that.

You know, I, I could think about people who [00:28:00] work within insurance and have to do payouts and things along that nature. Yeah, but you know, we're coming close on time. So I, I always want to ask this bonus question to give myself some homework and to give our audience some homework, but what books or people influenced you?

The. 

Sahil: Ooh, this is always a fun one. I think just because I'm like the kind of guy that a likes, a lot of numbers and B generally likes to think about things in unconventional ways. The, whatever the version of trilogy, but four books is of kind of the whole freako set is like a good way, in my opinion, to get your mind thinking right.

About a lot of. Yeah, just different ways to tackle problems in non-intuitive and non-direct ways in terms of that, actually, funnily enough, I tend to read a lot more fiction than I do. Non-fiction really? Yeah. What in particular? Yeah. I tend to like a lot of like science fiction and fantasy. I think the recommendation I would give a lot of people is broaden your reading horizons, cuz you kind of actually never know when a concept in [00:29:00] one place is directly translatable into your real world.

Yeah. You know, there's a, there's a patent I have from being an intern at Symantec. That quite literally was just based off my understanding of like how they figured out, how many tanks Germany had in world war II. Really like it, it's literally a direct application of like me going, oh yeah, I remember they did this thing there.

I wonder if this works here. Wow. And so I really. It's not the answer you're looking for. I'm sure. But like, just read, just read whatever you can, like download as much information as you can. And you'll. Connect the dots, however you want. I love 

Julian: that. No pun intended right there. 

Sahil: not, not as much. No, but you know, it's, it's out every 

Julian: now and again.

I love it, man. I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to, you know, share this with their audience and, and get people involved in dots. So last plug where can we find you? Where can we be? You know, a fan of not only what you're building, but also a supporter of, you know, your, your growth and your success.

Where can we. 

Sahil: Absolutely. [00:30:00] Our website is dots.dev. We have a Twitter that's not more the most active, so please tag it. So I feel compelled to log on and do some more. I love it. Besides that, you know, my Twitter is it's a hill 85, so it, my name 85. That's a better place to engage with dots as well.

So looking forward to chatting. Cool. 

Julian: Thank you so much, Sahil for joining the show, I'm really excited to see the progress and the success that comes. And until next time, thanks for being on. 

Sahil: Thank you for having me.

‍