In this second chapter in the story of Bunches, founder and CEO Derek Brown tells the story of how he met Tome, along with how they worked...and learned...together at their first start-up, Exeq.

Links from the Episode

• Start Something Bunch
• Addepar
• Exeq on Instagram

Connect with Derek

• Follow Derek on Twitter
• Connect with Derek on LinkedIn

Hey, I'm Ben.

In today's episode, Derek will be telling the story of when he first

met Tom, a co-founder here at Bunches.

You'll learn about their first startup together and how they

first got along or didn't enjoy this episode of Starting Bunches.

Hey everyone, this is Derek, your host here at Start Something

and founder, CEO of Bunches.

Last episode in the story of starting bunches, we talked about

my upbringing in brief and how my desire to serve creators also serves

as the driving force behind bunches.

In this episode, we'll introduce you to my co-founder.

We'll talk about the company where we worked at together prior to bunches.

Of course, for those of you who want to meet other listeners or

just have questions about the Bunches story, you can join the

Start Something Listener community at onbunches.com slash start something.

Now, let's get back to this story.

In this episode, we've meet a new character into the bunch of story Tomer

Ben David, otherwise known as Tom.

I haven't asked his permission yet, but it'll be all right to share his HAQ.

Sorry, Tom , in case you're unfamiliar.

In the spirit of our culture here at Bunches, we do ask a series

of questions that we call HAQs, hypothetically asked questions.

Of all of our podcast guests, those questions are, if you were

a fruit, what fruit would you be?

If you were a city, what city would you be?

If you were a beverage, what beverage would you be?

If you were a genre of music, what genre of music would you be?

And last, but certainly not least, if you were an animal, what animal would you be?

Tome's HAQ is that he is a Blackberry Tel Aviv, red wine, electronic

music eagle kind of person.

You'll see that we're both berries, we're both alcoholic beverages, and to

an extent, we're both flying creatures.

But I'll let you, dear listener, assess our true compatibility.

Now back to the story.

So it was the end of 2016 and I felt that it was time for my next big career move.

Things at Addepar were fantastic.

We had product market fit in a number of markets.

We were scaling fast.

We had just raised a sizable round and honestly, I felt done.

Wealth management is one of those industries that are so impactful.

But I never felt super passionate about the.

Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot, loved the people that I was

working with, and for shout out to Eric, the CEO at a Addepar.

But honestly, it was time to dip my toes in the waters of earlier stage startups.

So I started interviewing at a number of early stage startups, seed round preseed,

even series A, series B, and had a couple of opportunities at a number of very solid

companies, primarily in a CTO level role.

Couple of those eventually were acquired by fantastic companies

like WeWork or Goldman Sachs.

Left a lot of money on the table in some of the acquisitions, to be honest, but

during that time, at the end of 20 16, 1 evening in December, I received a message

from this young gun with three first names, and I received it everywhere.

I'm not just talking about like he slid into my dms once or shot me an email

once, or texted me via friend or whatever.

It was everywhere.

I received an email about it.

It was on LinkedIn.

He sent me the message on Angel List.

He sent a carrier pigeon to my house.

There was a telegram.

All talking about my work at a Addepar and what they were building

at this company called Exec Ex eq.

I was intrigued.

So I responded despite the awful name we met in a WeWork after this

gentleman, Tom had rescheduled on me.

That's right.

He rescheduled on me.

Tom, I don't if you're listening, I don't even know if you remember

that, but rescheduled on me and I met him and the exact team in the

financial district of Manhattan.

It just so happened that on that Monday morning when I met them, I

had come from a meeting also downtown Manhattan at a large sizable bank.

I was wearing a suit, which for those who may or may not know me,

a suit is about the furthest thing you would ever find me dressed in.

I'm typically in a jeans and a hoodie or jeans and a Manchester

Orchestra shirt or jeans, and a black.

Very rarely am I in a suit, but for some reason this day due to that meeting, I was

in a suit and I joined them in the WeWork.

It was like the seventh or eighth floor, and we all crammed into an office and

talked about exec and the team and what they needed and what the role was.

It was scrappy.

They were scrappy, obviously needed a lot of help.

Obviously, green behind the ears, a very young team, but

they had a lot going for them.

They were genuine.

I could see where I would have an outsized impact while

learning a lot at the same time.

They were Techstars backed, they were moving to Tel Aviv to join the

Techstars cohort there in Israel.

And so after a couple of back and forths on comp and my role and things

like that, I eventually joined the team and moved to Tel Aviv of all places

for a few months to really build out.

The product, move development in-house, et cetera.

And so to be honest, when I first moved to Israel and worked more and more alongside

Tom, I found that he was opinionated, stubborn, driven, had too much swag, but

he was also creative and articulate and.

Talented and all of those things.

And, but because of that, I didn't really get along with him.

I didn't really care for him, didn't like him.

He was, in retrospect, he was too much like me.

We didn't outright argue or fight, escalate into conflict

or anything like that.

It was just more ignored each other.

Real healthy start to the relationship.

Eventually we moved back to New York City.

The Techstars kind of cohort wrapped up and we eventually found that we've

built a real product and shipped a real product in into market.

I eventually became c e O of exec.

That product, by the way, was that we had decided to build a budgeting app

for the next generation of consumers.

So think about mint.com or you need a budget but for Gen Z or millennials, it

was extraordinarily colorful and creative.

But also we did a fantastic job of kind of accumulating and assimilating

and standardizing your budgeting data.

And we built a social feed on top of that budgeting data.

It had a standout feature that we called WINWI we or worth it or Not worth it.

So your transaction data actually acted as a check-in of sorts.

And so if you went to your local Starbucks for instance, and spent $6 and 80

cents at that local Starbucks, we would know this exact Starbucks that you had

spent the money at, and we would ask.

If that transaction was worth it or not worth it, and you could heart it

or dislike it, and then we would show that absent the amount that you actually

spent, but we would show that when we vote into a social feed with you and

your friends, and so it was collaborative budgeting along with some quality review.

Kind of data.

So think of it like Yelp meets your budgeting app and that was the product we

started to scale Exeq in New York City.

Obviously it needed to be confined to a single location at first.

And, we picked New York and things were going pretty well.

Like our goal was to help people spend better using their financial

data to help inform their spending decisions and people that really

resonated with a lot of people.

We could then take this data to small businesses.

Those small businesses find new customers all while helping

our customers save money.

And so through this process, I started to work a little bit more

closely together with Tom across marketing products and design work.

We started to scale the product in New York City and things were

going pretty well across the board.

And during that time I found out that.

While working with Tom that this kid's got what I look for in, in

people that I wanna work with, and he's got what I call the two T's.

And the five i's, the two T's are taste, which is style and a

level of aesthetic sense required for building consumer products.

He's got talent, which is a hundred x capability in at least one area.

He's got the five eyes, which are integrity.

Who you are when no one's looking is a common definition for integrity, right?

It's doing the moral or the ethical thing regardless of

what the decision is at hand.

Intelligence is the second eye, which is, can you get to the right answer when

there's a lot of data to sift through?

Are you smart enough?

Are you intelligent?

To sift through that data and find the right answer.

Intuition is can you get to the right answer with very little data?

What some people call instinct or gut feel.

So when there's no data to work from, can you still get to a right

answer the majority of the time?

The fourth eye now is intention, which is, do you do things on purpose?

Do you act with inten?

Intentionality?

Do you act delib?

And then last but not least, are the intangibles.

Do you know how to have fun?

Are you a good communicator?

Do you have a good sense of humor?

Can I laugh with you?

And as I worked more and more closely with Tom, not only did.

I realized that he was extraordinarily talented,

intelligent, intuitive, et cetera.

But, some of the times that I've laughed the hardest over the last

six or seven years has been on the back of his sense of humor.

And, I think we've crossed that hump by far from the days in Israel where

we didn't quite get along or whatever.

We've, hit it off at this point.

And are true co-founders and friends in our professional lives now.

And so eventually that led to us sharing an office together.

We worked together in a co-working space in, in Brooklyn, where we had an office

together, two standing desks side by side.

We eventually, brought in a black shag rug.

It would work in our socks or bare feet.

I know for some of the, that, that may be too gross, but you gotta be

honest, you don't, you're not living until you're working on a shag rug.

But we had a record player.

We would play jazz in the office, et cetera, and just get a lot done.

We laughed a lot.

We started to enjoy one another's company, spent more time with one

another, and simultaneously things were moving on the Exeq front.

Unfortunately, however, due to some pretty crippling decisions early on in Exeq's

life, it was struggling financially, which is one of the things that I learned

through my time at Exeq is like your cap table and how you assemble your cap table,

which for those of you listening who may not know what a cap table is, Cap table

or capitalization table is actually how investors invest in, in your company.

And it's a list, a ledger, if you will, of the investments made into your company.

And by and large, it's how much of the company you've given away for

that, for the capital investment.

And due to some decisions early on in the Exeq's life, they had given too much away.

I didn't know this until kind of later in, my time there at Exeq.

It was pretty hard to raise money with such a wild and crazy investment history.

And, but at the same time, we were seeing success in the New York area.

We had scaled the product, which at this time was a pretty robust iOS and Android.

And we had scaled the product in the New York area to, to over 50,000

users, which was pretty significant.

We were starting to see traction and growth to the point where we

could build B2B tooling on it.

Remember the small businesses I mentioned?

And so we began building monetization tools for the small businesses on

top of the consumer data that we were aggregating in New York City.

And then our first B2B client, they asked a question that changed the trajectory

of the entire company and really changed its trajectory, both Tome and I's lives.

It was one simple question.

Can we acquire you?

That's for the next episode here on start Something.

Thanks for listening.