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Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.
Greg Moran: Welcome back to The Founders Journey Podcast. Peter, good to be back for a new year here in 2024.
Peter Dean: Yeah, I'm excited. I'm really excited. I'm really excited to have one of the good founders on Drew. He's like, if you ever talk to him, what you would get to today, it's, uh, you'll see what I'm talking about.
Greg Moran: Absolutely, absolutely.
Greg Moran: We're here with Drew Edwards. Drew, you're gonna love this story when you start to hear Drew tell it. Drew's the CEO and the founderof Ingo Money, it's a venture-backed fintech that he started actually way back in 2001. It's just an awesome story that you're going to love in the winding road that this business has taken over those years. Ingo Money has become a leader in providing mobile forward, we'll actually ask him to define that, instant account funding and payment services. So it's a fintech. He's raised over $100 million in that business. But his career as a founder goes beyond Ingo and back when he founded and served as CEO and chairman of Town Services, which he took public back several years ago. So Drew, really great to have you on the podcast today.
Drew Edwards: Well, thanks for having me, Greg. And you guys are making me younger than I really am. Because Town, Town would have been 1995.
Greg Moran: Yeah.
Greg Moran: Well, if we could make you younger, we would have made ourselves younger too along the way. But I think we all can use all the help we can get at this point. That's right. So Drew, start us from the top here. How did you get started with Ingo back in 2001? I know it's been a while.
Peter Dean: Yeah, didn't work.
Drew Edwards: So that's a loaded question. How did I get started? I actually got fired from my first company after I took it public and then went to the Bahamas for a couple of years and came back and said, hey, this sucks. I've got to do something and tried to get the chairman of Town who was running another public company to hire me. And he said, you know, well, I'll hire you, but then I'm going to end up firing you and that won't be any fun. But which I said, are you crazy? That's the dumbest thing anybody's ever said to me. He said, well, you're, you just, you can't go play in NFL and then come back and coach high school football. So you're not going to like it here at my company. But anyway, he said, I'll invest in you. So here's half a million dollars. Let's go come up with an idea. And then three other board members did that. The same people that fired me. Next thing you know, I've got $2 million and literally no idea what we were going to do. Excuse me. So the idea we came up with back in 2001 was, hey, let's start a Hispanic bank. And don't ask me if I can speak Spanish because I don't, right?
Peter Dean: Thank you.
Greg Moran: Okay, so wait, I just want to pause you there for one second before you continue with the story. Because we said this was the crazy story. So Drew, if you're just listening to this on the, if you're just listening to voice, Drew is definitively not Hispanic. So, okay, so let's continue from that.
Peter Dean: I’m sorry.
Drew Edwards: In fact, we had opened our first physical branch in Atlanta and I had customers and employees, neither of which I could talk to, but we raised money and there were 700 or 800 Hispanic immigrants in the Atlanta market at the time and most of them were undocumented and they were hardworking and nobody was serving them and we were trying to solve that problem. And interestingly enough, I did hire a Hispanic female to actually run the bank who stayed with us for years.
But that was the point, we were operating 12 of these physical locations in Atlanta where we discovered this need that still permeates the business today to get instant access to your money. And if somebody wrote you a check, especially if you're a Hispanic immigrant and you're not from this country, you can't buy anything with a check. You can't walk into Starbucks with a check or send money home, right? So you've got to figure out how to actually get your good funds, we used to call them.
Peter Dean: Thank you.
Drew Edwards: So that was the beginnings of our notion that money should be faster and money should be good and spendable and real and all these other payment mechanisms just weren't getting us there. So for the first, I don't know, seven years of this company's life, we were running these Hispanic bank branches, but we didn't have a bank charter. We were partnered with a bank. That's the unfriendly term is we rented a charter from a financial institution, which means...
The branch is all set up. I'll bunk a Denoester community at a division of National Bank of Commerce out of Memphis, Tennessee. So that's, I'd call that phase one before the pivot of this business and till SunTrust Bank came along and acquired that bank and didn't want any part of this business that we were in. And so 18 months of fighting to stay alive with those guys. We finally exited that part of the business, exited that relationship with SunTrust.
and became Chexar, right? So we were El Banco and then we became Chexar because we kept this risk management platform that we were using to underwrite and convert those checks into good funds for these Hispanic consumers. And we said, hey, let's just go power all the real banks to do that in their own branches instead of us doing that ourselves. So we were growing like crazy for seven years and then we had to stop and went to zero revenue and start over.
Seven or eight years later, that was 2008, I think.
Greg Moran: So why did you have to stop? What was that kind of that pivot where you actually had to make that conscious decision that, okay, we're gonna turn off all of our revenue and kind of restart it?
Drew Edwards: Well, we were operating bank branches at the pleasure of another bank. So in the banking business, you have to have a banking license. It's called a charter, right? And so we were partnered with this bank out of Memphis. So each of these branches, the modern term today would be a bank sponsored model, but we were actually running physically, physically running branches of another bank under an operating agreement where
Greg Moran: Yep.
Drew Edwards: They were our customers and it was our revenue. But technically, legally, these were customers of the bank because they were the only ones with a license to operate these branches. So when SunTrust acquired them, literally the general counsel sat down in front of me and said, okay, how do we end this? Because we don't do what you're doing here at SunTrust. So it was an 18 month to two year file just to stay alive, but they made us stop using their charter, so therefore we had to stop providing the services that we were providing to our consumers. In today's world, if you were a neo-bank like Chime, you're operating under some sort of similar agreement with BankCorp or MetaBank, PATH, where it's called, et cetera. And if either one of your banks, or if your banks told you, okay, we're cutting you off, you'd be in the same position. You've got to stop. You no longer have a license to do what you're doing.
Peter Dean: You're done.
Drew Edwards: So our world came to an end. We rolled them all up in a bow and sold the 12 branches to a real bank and kept took the money and recapitalized ourselves and kept our technology platform and then started selling the technology. That's the beginnings of what we might call financial technology today or Fintech. We started selling it to other banks and then we got profitable about a year later. It was a lot cheaper by the way, being a Fintech than running 12 bank branches.
Peter Dean: Wow.
Greg Moran: So you guys, so you make this, I mean so you're effectively out of business in 2008. You've got it, you, so alright so you, so now you've restarted this thing as a FinTech before FinTech was a thing right? I mean is that
Drew Edwards: We did and we got profitable, Greg, but I knew I was in a bad place because I had gotten profitable helping financial service providers, including banks, cash checks. And about half of those customers were short-term lenders or payday lenders, which I don't have a problem with. But as an entrepreneur, I'm sitting here going...
Okay, and we hadn't taken any venture money yet, just my investors' money from the people that had fired me at the prior company and other folks we passed the hat and raised money doing. But I'm going, wait a minute, I'm cashing checks and we all know checks are gonna go away someday, although they still haven't gone anywhere, but you don't wanna be in that business or the DVD business. And we're doing it.
for an industry, at least half of our customers are under fire from Washington. Washington's trying to kill them. So my chances of an exit weren't very bright in my mind as long as that was our business. So we immediately started focusing on, all right, how are we going to get into something that the world will care about? Our customers loved us, our customers cared about us, but how are we going to ever sell this company or monetize this if we're cash and checks, which some people consider to be a buggy whip, and doing it for a group of customers that Washington wants to kill, right? So that's what kind of led us to the second pivot.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: So, I mean, it's wild, Drew, because essentially you guys are trying to create this business on the fly, doing essentially what you can at that point to just sort of stay in business after this issue with the previous bank. But you're solving, all along, you're solving a huge problem, right? I mean, you're focused on a huge need, which is really this, and maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but.
It's really this issue around the unbanked largely, right? It's moving money easier to people who maybe don't have the same access in a lot of ways that the three of us.
Drew Edwards: Yeah, so let me be clear. I mean, at 22 years we've been doing this, we've always been considered regulatory friendly, right? So we've never done anything in this company that any regulator to our knowledge has ever considered to be predatory or anything other than helping the underserved, right? Part of this community. What I'm referring to is an investor, most of them on the West Coast or in New York, are just gonna write off these categories based on macro rules they have. We only wanna be in growing marketplaces. We don't wanna be in regulated spaces, whatever their different rules are. But we've never, customers have always loved what they've done with us and we still do it. We do this today, if you skip forward, for PayPal and Venmo and ADP, all the big guys across America use our platform to enable digital access to these check proceeds which still are around and that's not all we do today. But it was more a part of our structure but once you've taken millions of dollars from other people as a founder, you don't get to just go, oops, changed my mind. I guess you could, you can just bankrupt the company and start over and then there goes your reputation in terms of the ability to raise money the next time. So I felt like for 22 years now, once you start a business and you take other people's money, A, you don't own it anymore. Even if you own 95% of it, if you took somebody else's money, then you have shareholders and it changes all the rules. But B, it's kind of like, you know, hanging on to the wolf by the ears. If you let it go before somebody kills it, before you exit the business properly, before you sell it, then that wolf's gonna chew your face off.
So you just keep hanging on and you don't let go until you find a path forward. And our path forward was, okay, let's sell this technology that we were using for ourselves to other banks, which we did. And then one of those banks, Regions Bank out of Birmingham, which is a Fortune 500 company, calls up Visa and says, hey, I think you should meet Ingo. And Visa at the time...
Mobile deposit capture, this notion of taking a picture of your check and deposit into your bank account, which we all do, just coming onto the scene. But for this underbanked consumer, most of these banks wouldn't even let them have a bank account. That's what the prepaid industry was built around, was a risk-free bank account, a bank account you can't overdraw for all of these people that the banks didn't want to trust or underwrite or for whatever reason.
Greg Moran: Yeah.
Drew Edwards: And so Visa literally came to see me two days after Regions introduced them and said, look, Regions tells us you can underwrite a check from a mobile device. We were doing that for H&R Block and MoneyGram and several other companies out there in addition to Regions. And Visa started telling us about this new transaction type they had, which today is known as Visa Direct and is a huge deal in the payments industry but nobody was using it. It was a European transaction. And they sat down in my office two days before Thanksgiving and said, if you can underwrite a check on a mobile device in real time, we can give you the ability to push the money to anybody's bank account. And effectively, we can create a digital funding source, turning checks into good funds and pushing them to Visa cards. And so that became the very first use case for Visa.
It was called the original credit transaction back then, but for Visa Direct. And that's really when we started taking institutional money, because now we needed some real capital to get behind the risk and the losses associated with, I couldn't take all that on by myself, and so with digitally cash in the checks, now you're gonna take the riskiest instrument in the payments industry, which is a paper check and you're gonna let somebody have all their money from it, somebody that a bank won't underwrite, so they're in a prepaid card to begin with, and you're gonna let them keep the piece of paper, so they can walk into any check casher and cash the very next minute, right? It's just stupid. It's really stupid if you think backwards. And it took us a couple of years to get control of the fraud, right? To get to enough scale that we could beat it. And to this day, we're really the only company out there that does that. We took it off our website, we don't pay our salespeople to sell it only because my investors are like, you need to focus on the killing the check, not cashing the check. And yet that thing's growing 20% year over year still to this day. I don't tell anybody about it. I don't pay anybody to go sell it. Our phone just rings because it's so hard to do. Nobody else does it in the market. I don't know if that, and that's just the what we still call the legacy side of our business.
Greg Moran: And which, you know, is really amazing, right? When you look at it, I mean, I think a lot of times, when you start to get institutional money coming in, and you reference this a little bit, you start to make decisions based on these kind of really broad macro trends and things like that. And there's no doubt, I think, fast forward 34 years, the check, you know, the way that we think about a check today is gonna either not exist or be a lot different, right? But the amount of money that can be made, I think, by founders looking at, there's really two things, two parts of that, right? Number one is looking at those areas that are the really long tail of these industries where everybody else is kind of pulling out of them. And to say these things are, these trends, you know, we think in terms of like months or maybe a couple of years, these things, these things can take decades to really take hold sometimes, right? There's an awful lot of money to be made. And I think the other really key takeaway there for me, I think if you're a founder, is solving the really hard problem that nobody else wants to solve, right? I think that's the other, I think, really big part of that, Drew, is like, that is just a, like you said, I mean, it's an incredibly hard problem that everybody else says, no, I don't wanna touch it. But by solving it, you carve out this really unique niche. And I know that's a small part. Well, I mean, it's only a part of the business today. And it's transformed, but in a lot of ways, maintaining that has really fueled the growth of the rest of the business as well, right?
Drew Edwards: Well, and if we were Netflix, it's our DVD program. And I don't know if everybody's as old as I am, but I used to go to Blockbuster all the time and rent movies on the weekend and take them home to my kids or whatever. And this little company, Netflix, came along and said, "'Hey, I can do it. There's a better way to do that. I'll put them in the mailbox to you, right?' I mean, you just go online on the mobile app and subscribe to what DVDs you want. I'll mail them to you and I'll give you an envelope and you send them back when you're done." And again, that was a great business, just like what we're doing for checks is a great profitable business meeting a very important need in the marketplace. But nobody cared even at Netflix unless there was a future plan, right? And the future plan was we're gonna steal the relationship from Blockbuster and what's coming is this thing called broadband and bandwidth. And we're gonna be able to stream these movies eventually straight into their TVs and or now into their phones and their tablets.
Greg Moran: Right.
Peter Dean: Mm-hmm.
Drew Edwards: But only recently, I mean, very recently, I don't know the exact date, did Netflix stop actually delivering CDs to people's mailboxes? So it'll carry on for much longer than you think. And there's a company out there called Redbox that still makes a ton of money renting DVDs out of kiosk, right? So the check side of things for us is two things. It's a big moneymaker for us and it's truly solving a consumer need, but it's also a stepping stone for then taking it to the next level. Hey guys, whenever we cash a consumer's check on their mobile phone for one of our big partners, what's really happening is that consumer got one payment instrument, but they really wanted the different kind of payment instrument. They want the money in their bank account or they want the money somewhere else. So, why don't we stop sending them the check and charging the consumer to change that check and go to the corporates who are sending those checks because consumers have stopped writing checks. This is coming from B to C transactions. This is coming from bill pay and corporate payouts and refunds and all kinds of stuff going out there. Why don't we skip a step here and go to those corporates and give them a digital solution to actually ask that consumer where do you want this money? And then we can digitally put it there instantly, real funds into anything in their pocket. And now they don't have to wait and they don't have to pay to convert that risky instrument into good funds. And we can charge the corporate to do that. And we charge them less than it would have cost them to produce the check to begin with. So today we do that for big insurance companies like Geico and Liberty Mutual and others, we do it for seizures, for sports betting, we do tipping payouts. We do every industry that's producing a check or what I'd call slow digital, ACH, is ripe for modernizing, but without that DNA in the beginning of Visa saying, hey, if you can underwrite the risk on that check, I can partner with you to fund their accounts without in the old school days, you'd have to have a settlement relationship with every bank to be able to do that instantly and safely. This is before FedNow and RTP and even Push to Cart or PayPal or any of that stuff, I guess. And so that old instrument, that problem in my entrepreneurial mind of how am I ever gonna get out of this company if I'm, you know, cashing checks, it actually was the foundation for instant money.
And it's what led me to the biggest payment network in the world and partner with MasterCard and Visa and all of them now, I guess. And it was because they were trying to now do like Netflix and say, well, let's just skip the whole DVD and stream the movie straight to their phone. Let's just skip the whole check and stream the cash straight to their bank account. And that's what Ingo does. And that's where the fastest growing part of our business is, is trying to help everybody actually still serve the consumer by getting them the money where they want it instantly, not make them pay for what I call a layover, right? I don't wanna go to New York through Chicago. I wanna go to New York. Don't make me go through Chicago. Don't give me a check. And then I might have to pay somebody to convert that to good money. But believe it or not, the check side's still growing and probably will through my lifetime.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: That's, it's unreal, you know, and I think there's just, there's so much of that when you look at, when you look at businesses out there that, you know, they get over anxious to start to, you know, okay, we're going to get rid of this business. VCs are classic for this, right? Dump this business, pick up this business, and you're just leaving a ton of money on the table and we're leaving a ton of growth on the table.
Drew Edwards: You know, Greg, I had a fellow entrepreneur of mine who was smarter than me, made a lot more money than me over the last 25 years, tell me one time, a long time ago, he was venture backed. And when I went public in my first company, I skipped the whole venture process. Back then in the late 90s, the public markets were acting like venture capitalists and giving anybody money, as long as you weren't making money, as long as you were growing like crazy, which is the opposite of really what it should be. But he told me one time, he said, Drew, even when you take other people's money, you should try to run the company every day like you're gonna own it forever. Because these decisions around what's Wall Street gonna care about or what's the VC gonna care about, oftentimes can cause you to make bad business decisions, not the same decision you would have made if it was just your company and you were just trying to make money and serve your customers. So I can't tell you, I've been great at that, but I can tell you, I do believe that's the right answer if you're an owner or a founder, is run it like you were gonna own it forever. Don't try and put lipstick on a pig, don't try and dress things up, build a real good quality business. And then as Warren Buffett would say, the right people will recognize that and put value on that. So it's hard to do.
Greg Moran: Amen. It is.
Peter Dean: Yeah, so true. This is what I mean by the good people like you you've told me that before and you talked about it and I know like how did you come to make that like I don't know it's the fourth pivot but the final one to where Ingo's headed today how did you make that change? You know
Drew Edwards: Well, I didn't do any of this on purpose, by the way, Peter. I think I've stepped in every pile of shit in the pasture. But you don't do that on purpose, but the world's full of potholes and piles of crap, right? And the difference is, do you quit or do you figure out how to shake it off your boot and go in a different direction or just plow right on through it? So I can't claim to be, sometimes I feel really stupid because why do I keep stepping in these piles? But at the same time, I'm not sure any company, if they really told you the truth, there's some companies that are so good at just telling you the good stuff, what they want you to know. And I am the worst at that. I tell you whatever's on my mind. I think every company's making mistakes and getting themselves in ditches and having to get out of ditches, that's just part of it, right? So hopefully you do it, you minimize it, but there's no magical formula for me to, other than to say, okay, well, let's don't step in that same pile twice. But let's...
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: And even that, I mean look, I know I could speak for the three of us safely, but even that, I mean, I've literally stepped in the same pile of shit four or five times, just turned around, walked right back into it, turned around, walked into it again, slip, fall into it, roll around in it for a while, until somebody's like, dude, take a shower, you're disgusting.
Peter Dean: And to your point, you're saying you just gotta...
Drew Edwards: Ye- Yeah!
Drew Edwards: Somebody moved it!
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Drew Edwards: You know, when I went, I don't know, I don't know that it should publish this, but when we were coming out of that El Banco phase, you mentioned going public. We actually went through a road show and got listed on the NASDAQ. This is this company, the second time around. And these underwriters, and they weren't quality underwriters, it's a big mistake, but they literally 15 minutes before the hour told the SEC to take us public.
And then they changed their mind and didn't show up for the pricing call and didn't give us our money, right? And so all of a sudden I woke up and I'm listed on the NASDAQ. I've got maybe 10 grand in the bank and an $800,000 a month burn rate. And they didn't give me my money. And I owe a private jet company and bound the printer and I'll offer them a million dollars. And we had to figure out how to delist. The point of all that without any money, you can't talk to anybody because you're in a quiet period.
But I walked into the time I had that bank board, it was 13 board members. And one of those board members, and I walked in to start the process of filing bankruptcy. And one of my board members looked at me and he said, what do you mean filing bankruptcy? I said, well, we don't have any money. He said, just yesterday, you were in New York telling everybody we're worth $200 million.
Now today, you're telling me we're going bankrupt. He said, what happened between yesterday and today to this company? And I said, well, I can't make payroll. I'm burning half a million dollars a month or whatever it was, $800,000 a month at the time. And he said, that's a problem. That's not a noun. That's a pile of shit you stepped in, right? And he actually pulled out a checkbook, just to be poetic and all this, he pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a $500,000 check in the middle of the board meeting and laid it on the table and said, "'If you'll stop whining and go make some hard decisions, "'here's the first $500,000. "'I ought to buy you a few days. "'Go figure out how to recover "'that company you had yesterday.'" And so that's when we...
I walked out of there and cut the company in half and stopped paying all the executives. And we found a way through it. But that was so enlightening to me because from his perspective, the company didn't all of a sudden have cancer. Somebody just screwed us. So go fix it, go find a way to fix it. And so they just, sometimes you just don't see them coming and they happen anyway.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: Here's the thing. I just want to take a second, Peter, and I know before you go into the next question, because we had a question that we were going to ask Drew on this, because this is just a, I mean, and honestly, the three of us have been around for a long time, we've been doing this, we've been involved in a lot of companies and seen a lot of stuff. I've never seen a company be public for like 15 minutes before. I'm not even sure, I don't even think. What's that? No.
Drew Edward: I don't think it's ever happened. I don't think it's ever happened again. They probably changed the rules. And by the way, the regulatory authorities later for not related to us, but for a string of practices ended up shutting that 1200 office underwriter down, right? And prosecuting people for just unethical behavior. Yeah.
Greg Moran: So
Drew Edwards: It's never happened before. My law firm was one of the biggest securities law firms in the country. And they literally, when we hung up the phone, they literally looked at me and said, okay, we don't even know what to do now. We're gonna have to go. I don't think this is in the rule book.
Greg Moran: This isn't a thing, man!
Drew Edwards: If you've ever gone public, Greg, you can't raise money, you can't talk to anybody, you got to like 30 day freeze or quiet period. And we had to delist from NASDAQ. So never traded a share, never got a dollar, won't do that again. Today my bankers are Goldman Sachs in New York. I went to the other end, I said, biggest mistake was signing on with a bucket shop of underwriters, you know, because reputable banks won't do that.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: So don't go with cheap accountants and cheap lawyers, right? And this is like what? This is like the third time you're, right, just for the record, like if you're following, if you're keeping a tally as Drew's telling the story, this is like the third time you're out of business. So like, I mean, just as the story unfolds, like, no, it's not, that's the beauty of Bulls, though, Drew. Like, that's the thing, and I want Peter to get into culture in a second.
Drew Edwards: Yeah, yeah, I was going to because again, let's go step by step.
Peter Dean: No, dude. He even had good lawyers at the time.
Greg Moran: Because there's an underlying piece of this that's so important. Peter and I joked about this a bunch of times on this podcast with other guests that the only difference between going out of business and not going out of business in companies that I've founded before is the fact that nobody actually told me we were out of business. Like it was the only thing and I wasn't smart enough to figure it out. So I just kept showing up for work and you just try to figure out like, how do you do it next, right? And...
That's exactly this story, right? It's like this sort of resilience that's like, all right, well, I don't know, we got other people's money, we gotta go figure this out, right? And there's something just enormously powerful about that. Peter, you wanna get into the culture side of this?
Peter Dean: Yeah, so I mean, I've worked with Greg's company, amazing culture at Outmatch, Harvard, checked those that journey. I've actually got to spend some time with your company, you yourself, some other teammates. And then also, I went to this happy hour and it was like, is everyone like this here? I mean,
First of all, how do you define culture as for yourself? And my second question to that is, how do you use that over the years as one of your advantages?
Drew Edwards: Well, first you do it wrong. I think Churchill said that about the Americans a long time ago. They'll eventually do the right thing only after they've tried all the wrong things. So I've tried all the wrong things. In my first company, I got fired because I had a terrible culture and I was yelling at everybody and screaming at them because we were public and we shouldn't have been public and the whole world's on my shoulders and we weren't making our, I knew we weren't going to make our numbers. We never actually missed them, but we would have eventually.
And so that didn't work. And I have one of my close friends executives back then tell me, Drew, man, if, as a CEO, if you've got somebody in a position that's not cutting it, you can't beat them over the head and they'll do better. You can't yell at them and they'll do better. You have to replace them or support them. You got to pick one of the two, get rid of them or find somebody new, right? And I've tried to learn in this company that as an entrepreneur and as a CEO with a with two or 300 employees, you literally can't do anything except through your people. And so it's when I guess realized that you have to love your teams and love to come to work and work with them or all these piles of crap are gonna really destroy you, right? I mean, you can't get through it. And so our culture, I think today, maybe this is all...
entrepreneur-led companies. It's a reflection of my personality. And whoever's running the shop's personality, I'm sure Amazon reflected Bezos for years. I don't know right now, right? And I just love the people I work with and I don't keep somebody around if I don't like them. And if they're not working, if they're not cutting the mustard. And so...
Peter Dean: Mm-hmm.
Drew Edwards: It's the same with clients, it's the same with fellow employees. So what we tried to do at Ingo is A, I was still the guy that would do a contract on a handshake before we get into this bank regulated world and all that stuff. I've had many multimillion dollar clients that literally just shook my hand and said, okay, let's try this. And we never had a contract. I have still clients today that pay us $5 million a year that we renegotiate the contract all the time and never pull it out and look at it, right? Well, we'll go to them and say, look, you know, our cost structure's changed, the world's changed, let's talk about this. And it goes in both directions. So it starts with your clients and how you treat them and how all of our people treat them. And then it rolls right up to, why don't people come in every day when they got choices, when they got headhunters calling them all the time, wanting to go somewhere else, right? So Ingo.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Drew Edwards: Everybody's here because they want to be here. I don't think I've had anybody volunteer. On my team, anyway, on my direct team, I don't think I've had anybody voluntarily resign unless something bad happened and we had to part ways or whatever. And that just is who we are. It's not a strategy. It's not a plan. It's just who we are. Work hard, take care of each other. As you saw, we do play hard, right?
Peter Dean: Mm-hmm.
Drew Edwards (34:49.912) But what makes us different in this FinTech space is we're competing with all the up and to the right shiny objects in Silicon Valley, right? And they don't care. Like Lydia, my chief revenue officer, was here as a sales rep for two or three years, went off on her own to get an education in the market, including in Silicon Valley. And she called me up one day when she's working for this high-flying Silicon Valley company. And she said, many of these, I don't wanna broadly paint Silicon Valley bad, cause they're not, and I have a lot of clients out there, but she said, I don't think I ever realized how many or how little they actually care out here about the people or about what you told somebody you would do. The whole philosophy was,tell them what you gotta tell them, tell them the story. Tell them the story needs to be, the pitch deck, everything needs to be slick and everything needs to be up and to the right. You gotta have a chief of staff because that's the new thing and you gotta have all this stuff, right? And she said, it's so opposite of Ingo because we always know if Ingo, if you told us you'd do something, then you're gonna do it. If we tell our clients we're gonna do something, we're gonna do it. If we screw up, even if contractually we're not obligated, we're gonna make it right. And it's not like that in the broader tech community, right? The turnover is super high. The money behind a lot of them, they only care about, you know, up into the right growth and you're only as good as the last two quarters. So we have some very patient investors who I think have our similar philosophy and have helped us stay alive. And...
Peter Dean: Mm-hmm.
Drew Edwards: It's a partnership with us and our investors, it's a partnership with us and our employees, and it's a partnership between us and our customers and the shareholders benefit from all that. And I just think it either is or it isn't. If you're not that, you gotta find a different way to compete because you can't make this stuff up, right?
Greg Moran: Yeah. No. And, you know, I think I think with a lot of that comes from Drew too, is this, you know, is that kind of the transactional nature of these companies, right? And I don't mean what the product they're selling. I mean, in the kind of the three to the traditional three to five year hold periods, the, you know, where the tolerance and the time, you know, for anything to go wrong, it's non existent, right? You can't, you know, the journey that you just,
walked us through is one, you know, we're joking about it with, you know, stepping on Paul's ship, but it's the tour. It's a totally normal founders journey. Right. I mean, that's why we called this podcast what we did, because it's that meandering road that it takes to actually build something sustainable and build something for the long term takes a lot of time. Right. And, you know, when you operate in these three to five year windows, you just, it's not about that. Right. It's about can we gain in this short window of time? And it becomes a very transactional relationship with that company. I say that, I'm in the VC business myself, right? And, but it is something that I think any VC, any private equity firm needs to wrestle with because there is something very misaligned.
Drew Edwards: When you can't argue with the math out there, right? I mean, they've made, but what the math they never talk about is for every thousand companies they fund, how many actually finish, right? And so that's, that by definition says it all. They know going in that most of these are gonna fail and they're looking for Elon Musk or they're looking for Jeff Bezos or whatever.
Greg Moran: No! No.
Drew Edwards: But they never talk about the 900 other companies that had real people who worked their heart and soul at this idea, who just one day woke up and they gotta go start over somewhere else. And so that just breaks my heart. And I don't know, you know, we don't just walk away from our shareholders. We, you just, and our shareholders don't walk away from us.
and we don't walk away from our clients. And in 22 years, we've almost never lost a client, right? And so, and I don't make as much money as my competitors. I may not be as big as our competitors, but I think we have the best service, the best product, the best relationship with our customers. It's one reason I love my partnership with Goldman Sachs. I don't think they have everybody on the planet. They just have anybody that really values
their way, right, and who they are. And I can go down the list. And that's just more of what I identify with is, I don't shop at Walmart. I'd rather go to Ace Hardware store than Home Depot because I still value that service and human interaction. And I'm a small town guy, I guess, as it relates to that. But there are really good businesses built around that philosophy that lasts for generations and lasts for...
a long time and that's just, you know, who we are. Someday we are venture backed, someday we will sell this company, but hopefully to a buyer who truly values the culture, the customer base, the technology and the whole value proposition and not just the P and L, not just the up and to the right. And I, you know, as an entrepreneur and I'm sure you do this too, I don't know that many companies that get bought for that for a big premium that ever continue on to be what they're supposed to be. And I wanna be one of those companies that long after I'm gone and we're owned by probably some big strategic, it's still there, it still has an identity, right? And the culture still, at least you can still find it somewhere.
Greg Moran: Well, it's building that 100 year enterprise, right? A close friend of mine and Peter's, a guy named Martin Babinec. And the story reminds me so much of talking to Martin. Martin is founder of Trinet, who is, they're now, they're publicly traded. They're, you know, New York Stock Exchange, enormous company. And these same principles that you're talking about are very much, you know, the same things that, and even the advice that you gave earlier, right?
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: Build this company to be something you want to continue to come to work for decades. It's always that principle because I think there is a path for companies like that today. There is really a path for, there's recaps and trading that will take place to provide earlier investors liquidity and bring new investors in, but that path to build something really sustainable, I think probably more so than it has been in a long time is.
is emerging and you do have investors that actually look for that kind of, how do we build something sustainable for the long term? Just to kind of wrap this up, Drew, I mean, where do you see the business going? How does this evolve? How do things evolve? How do you see your role as founder changing here in our last minute or two that we've got?
Drew Edwards: Well, I would, I can honestly say starting about a year, maybe 18 months ago, we got to a strange place in my entrepreneurial career in that, that my, my board actually said to me, okay, now you're pointed in the right direction. You got the right team. Everything's working. Just don't screw it up, right? Just, just leave it alone. And so sometimes that's a hard lesson to learn for an entrepreneur who by definition likes to change stuff, likes to.
tinkered things. You know, my wife told me one day not too long ago that I was the only thing, she was the only thing in my life and my daughter that I hadn't changed. You know, I changed cars, I changed clothes, I changed everything, right? And so we're at this place where you really want to get to, whereas the CEO, I'm just watch guarding. We don't need any more outside money. We don't, so don't have the capital raising thing to deal with. We've got customers, we've got
executives that I trust that are running every aspect of the business. And so sometimes I feel bored. Sometimes I feel like I'm not doing anything when, when I'm actually doing what I think we're supposed to be doing, which is, which is safeguard it and let it grow safeguarded and let it just let your team, you know, get where they can go and it's freed me up to focus on, okay, what, what partnership, what deal, what, what
thing in the market could really be meaningful to us that I can go focus my time on because operating the business, I don't have to be involved in right now. And that is a very liberating place to be, especially since I'm not a very good operator. But what I am is that, hey, I wanna create something. And it's like it's already in the oven and just.
Don't open it up and stick your finger in it right now, right? So we're in that stage where it's working, it's growing, the team's in place, the customers are happy. And my only wish is let's not step in another pile of shit, right? Let's just between now and the end, let's just keep it between the lines.
Greg Moran (44:42.416) I think I can't imagine a better way to end it. So the future plan is just don't step in another pile of shit. That is perfect. This is awesome, Drew. I mean, we had said, you know, when we first got started, Peter and I were joking about this earlier, that this story is...
Peter Dean: If anyone could deal with it, yeah. If anyone could, if anyone could deal with that, it would be you.
Greg Moran: The story is just, I mean, it is like pure entrepreneurship, right? The pivoting and the, then we were out of business, then we got back, then we were out, then we got back and business doesn't look anything like it, but underpinning this thing is this, you know, incredible, uh, incredible culture that you've been able to build. So, uh, this is just an awesome story. And, uh, and so glad you were able to join us on the podcast to tell it.
Peter Dean: It's like the truth.
Drew Edwards: It was fun. I'm flattered. And anyway, I can help or give back. I'd love to.
Greg Moran: Absolutely. Well, this is a great place to start. I think there's a lot of people who are going to learn some great lessons from this thing about resilience and about not being afraid to pivot and, you know, not being able to just keep going. Right. It's just about that constant forward progress. Right. It's not going to all be pretty. These are not textbook rides. This is a mess along the way. But stick with it.
Peter Dean: Yeah.
Greg Moran: You don't think that's the story.
Drew Edwards: I love quotes, as you know, and I'll end it with that. I think it was General Patton that said, no battle plan survives the first shot that's fired, right? So that's starting a company. You can write whatever business plan you want, but that first pile of shit's gonna change it.
Peter Dean: It's so true. It's so true.
Greg Moran: Awesome. Drew, just real quick before we go, how do people, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to contact you or learn more about Ingo or yourself or anything on LinkedIn, any kind of social channels, how do people connect with you?
Drew Edwards: We're out there on LinkedIn and all. I'm pretty easy to find. I'm Drew at ingomoney.com. I think that's fixing to change to Drew at ingopayments.com, but they'll both work. And our website always has a way to get through to us, but usually you'll find me at a FinTech show somewhere with a bunch of younger people because I'm the old guy in the room. That was the last thing. I read a meme this Christmas. Doesn't it suck when you see some old person in the restaurant and you realize you went to high school with them?
I don't feel that way.
Greg Moran: Oh my God, that's awesome. Well, we'll put kind of the links to Ingo, to your LinkedIn profile, stuff like that in the show notes. So Drew, thanks for joining us on the podcast. It's awesome.
Drew Edwards: Right.
Drew Edwards: You too. Thanks,Greg and Peter.