Daniel is currently the CEO and Chairman of Transactive, an international financial technology company that provides payment infrastructure software and payment services globally. Under Daniel’s leadership Transactive has successfully launched its software, services over thousand customers, done over $1bn in payments and achieved profitability. Previously Daniel was the Vice President of Finance and Operations at Mobile Gaming Technologies. Mobile Gaming Technologies was the world’s first crypto iGaming platform. Under his leadership Mobile Gaming Technologies became venture backed, scaled international and achieved profitability. He also led Mobile Gaming Technologies through several successful capital raises, raising over $40m for the company. MGT became the first blockchain company in the world to sponsor a major league sports team, Arsenal Football Club from London. Eventually the MGT sold the company to Novomatic, the largest privately held gaming company in the world with over 5bn in revenue per year. Prior to joining Mobile Gaming Technologies, Daniel worked as an Investment Banker at Financial Technology Partners, D.A. Davidson and Wells Fargo / Wachovia. He advised technology companies on mergers and acquisitions, capital raising and strategic corporate development. He has successfully closed over 15 M&A and capital raise transactions. Daniel is also a board member of several technology companies spanning from London to Silicon Valley. He is a financial technology enthusiast and speaks at conferences all around the world about financial technology, blockchain and cryptocurrency. Daniel graduated with a B.S. in Finance & minor in Chemistry from Oregon State University.
In his free time Daniel likes to run, hike and go to the gym. He is also an active reader, trying to read at least 4 books a month.
We talk about
Why did you decide to leave Investment banking and do a startup?
What was it like being the first Blockchain company to sponsor a major Soccer/ football team?
What will be the big breakthroughs in Fin tech in the coming years?
Connect with Daniel
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Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast
Shawn Flynn 0:02
On today’s show, we sit down with Daniel Edward was vice president and finance of operations for mobile gaming technologies, which was the first blockchain company in the world to sponsor major league sports team Arsenal football club from London, after a successful exit has since moved on to be the chief executive officer, and chairman of the board for transactive Group, which is a global instant banking and payments platform on track to do 2 billion in transactions in just his third year of operations. We talk about what can one learn from the competitors in one space? When is it time to move on from one idea to another? and Why leave investment banking to do a startup? This is much more today’s episode of the Silicon Valley podcast. And don’t forget to write a review on iTunes and share amongst your network helps us create great content now, let us start the show. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:55
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech to learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:12
I’m excited to introduce Daniel Edwards, who I’ve been a friend with for years and years here in Silicon Valley. I’ve got to see his career grow from when we first met at bay angels to, I can’t even tell you how many startups he’s been involved in. Daniel, can you give us a little bit of background of your career up to this point?
Daniel Edwards 1:31
It’s been about eight, either as an owner, part of the core team board member. Yeah, that’s it’s about eight. But yeah, so my background, I was a fifth generation mF fifth generation Oregonian family came over on the Oregon Trail a little bit. pioneer spirit in me, was a first-generation college graduate as well. So I ended up going to Oregon State University, from there went into finance, investment banking, particularly, I was one of the most active FinTech investment bankers in the United States, focusing on doing deals in that space. And that was mostly in the Midwest. And that was interesting. And then from there, I end up starting a company ended up going on to raise $40 million in venture funding, sold that company to a multibillion-dollar revenue a year company, which was good, I started a new company now, we’re on track to do about 2 billion in payments. It’s a FinTech company. It’s kind of how we measure everything is how many payments are you doing? So we’re going to do, hopefully close to 2 billion or a little over 2 billion this year.
Shawn Flynn 2:33
So your whole career is consistent and out of the box thinking? Can you share a couple of stories of times that you just had some amazing results because of not acting conventional
Daniel Edwards 2:46
Thought of a story this morning. That’s not really in the business field. But it’s something that kind of shaped my life. 17 I always thought I was going to be a doctor would always carry around a medical book with me. I worked at a hospital. I had grandparents visiting from Washington, getting ready to go to work, it was about 6am. And my grandpa says, Hey, you know, come up, come over here. You know, I got something to tell you. And I go, okay, and he says, There’s doers. And there’s watchers, there’s people that will do things in this world. And then there’s people that will watch those doers do those things. And he was What are you? Are you a watcher? Or are you doer I go? I don’t know. Cool story, Grandpa, I’ll talk to you later. That’s kind of left that conversation there. I’m on my way to work. I’m driving there listening some tunes. I look over the left for my eye. And I see this guy in this pickup truck kind of looks like he’s rocking out to some punk music or something. I realized that he’s not he’s actually having a seizure in his truck. I’m sitting there kind of thinking, Oh, what can I do about it? And then that thought popped in my head or the conversation that I had with my grandpa, where it was like, are you a watcher you do or what are you going to do? I got out of the car. I put mine in park and kind of ran alongside this car, this truck that was entering the intersection. And I was able to kind of get my hand in past his window that was rolled down a little bit, pull his door open on the inside, and then put my hand on the brake, stop his truck, get him on buckled in and out of the truck. He was choking on some shoe. And I was able to kind of clear his airway there, tilt his head, get him breathing regularly again, and wait with Him until the ambulance came. That was a crazy experience. And I got some help from some other people kind of as time went on. Mostly it was just me and I was thinking wow, what would happen like if I didn’t do something like maybe somebody else would have right? I waited till the ambulance got there. amulets came, he ended up actually going to the hospital that I worked. And some people in ER go hey, you know, we’re hearing these crazy stories from this guy downstairs is saying the little kid like ran alongside his truck, pulled him out of his truck and got him out. And I think it’s you. Is that you as like, Oh yeah, he’s here. And again, Jeff. That was insane. What were you thinking? What was I going to do watch him, you know, hit other cars and die or whatever, like do something about it. And so that’s a philosophy that I’ve always just kind of tried to use my head is, what are you going to do? Are you going to do something because if you’re not going to do something, somebody sure well, or you’re going to watch somebody else do something. So I’ve always kind of tried to make it a point to where I proactively go into opportunities. You know, I don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines. It’s, it’s cool to be a fan. It’s even cooler to be a player. That was one story, I had the more business-related story of kind of outside of the box thinking. Oregon State isn’t known for its campus recruiting for investment banking, I really wanted to go into investment banking. And we’ll get into this and other questions, I think, the reasons why I wanted to be an investment banker, but there was no opportunity for me to get interviews with investment banking firms, they just didn’t come to Oregon State, they didn’t even think about Oregon State. I mean, the amount of people that went into investment banking from Oregon State, you could count it on one hand, you know, it’s less than five people, I ended up cooking up this little scheme, where I got the school to pay for a trip to Seattle with the finance club. And we were able to go visit some firms and talk to people, most of it was wealth management, things I wasn’t particularly interested in, I knew that we would have a block of about four hours or so at the end of the day on Friday afternoon, to where I could go and hit up Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, city, Wells Fargo, all these different banks, and see if I could get into talk to somebody higher up there. And my hope was that, if I was talking to somebody higher up, then maybe I could get them to recommend me for an internship or something York or somewhere else. So I ended up going to Goldman Sachs, nothing ended up going to city, nothing, you know, all the way around, getting rejected. Most of the time wasn’t even getting past the first security. And after 911, everything was shut down pretty tight. I ended up last chance Wells Fargo, I had about 19 Kids trailing me kind of like I’m the mother duck, you know, they’re all here. I’ll just follow this kid as he goes around and fails trying to get into all these investment banking firms. I ended up going to the top floor of Wells Fargo got passed the security desk, which was already you know, when number one, I go up to the Secretary there, and I say, hey, the President is region. He has a meeting with me. And she goes, Oh, that’s really weird. He doesn’t have any meetings Friday afternoon, usually, what’s your name? She goes looks at it. She said, I don’t think so I’m sorry. I go, can you just go check with them. And she goes in, she checks them. I think out of curiosity, he took the meeting with me. And so I ended up going and having a two hour plus meeting with him. While all these other kids kind of waited in the lobby. And then they went downstairs, ended up his daughter had went to Oregon State for a little while. Oregon State was really good at baseball back then back-to-back World Series champions. So we had a lot to talk about. So from there, he ends up throwing my name around multiple places around the country, I was able to get an internship with what cobia which Wells Fargo was merging with at the time in Miami, Florida. And so from there, that’s kind of how I was able to break in and kind of get my first big, you know, internship that would kind of lead towards that track of getting into investment banking field. But if I wasn’t creative, I guess is a good word for it, then and thinking outside the box, then you wouldn’t have happened at all.
Shawn Flynn 8:18
And how long were you in investment banking? And why did you want to leave it to do a startup?
Daniel Edwards 8:24
I was in investment banking for close to four years. And it was great. I loved it. Not a lot of investment bankers come out and say they loved investment banking, I think only the broken and the weird ones do. The reason I liked investment banking is I had a very unique opportunity. When I went to do investment banking, I got two different opportunities. One was to go work in Chicago, Illinois, or the other was to go work in Los Angeles and working in Los Angeles would have meant I was working with a very developed team, I would have been an analyst just working on analysts’ things and that would have been that, or the Chicago team was just starting up, and it was going to be me. And two managing directors. They told me if you go into this, you better be willing to work 100-hour weeks, you’re going to be nose to the grindstone, it’s going to be horrible. And you know me, I go, Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, I actually ended up not going to do the Los Angeles job. I went to Chicago instead. And it was incredible. That was where we ended up being really active in the FinTech community, in the financial system of helping banks helping FinTechs and learning that whole world. The real reason I chose Chicago over Los Angeles was that I knew that it was going to be a lot of work, but it was going to be a lot of hands-on experience. And I knew that if I went to Chicago, I would be in the meetings with the Managing Directors, I would be in the boardroom with all the decision makers. And it was the quickest way for me to learn the most amount of knowledge possible. And I knew if I went to Los Angeles, I just be another cog in the wheel. Doing Excel models doing PowerPoint I had to do all that stuff in Chicago. But I also got the upside of going into these board meetings in the C suite interactions where all the work that I did we actually talked about. And I think for me, that’s what was really interesting. There’s one story that I can think about from that, that wouldn’t have happened most or almost any other investment banking analyst. And that was it. I put together a whole report and a whole analysis for a bank in Champaign Urbana, which is the University of Illinois, that bank was very targeted towards college related students, professors, people that work there, one of the things that they were exploring was, how do we interact those people more, and this was a very brick and mortar bank, been doing a lot of innovative things, I basically came to them saying you need to start an app, you need to like get an app out there to where college students can upload checks, college students can go and check their balances, you know, they can request assistance. People don’t go to branches, and they won’t go to branches, and especially this new generation, you know, they want to check things from their dorm room, I’m sitting in that boardroom. And these men that are much more older and experienced than me, are basically just saying, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Two things I was able to learn, you know, I was able to learn all that knowledge that they had, you know, I love reading books. I love learning from people in their experiences. There’s no better way to learn than previous experiences. A fool learns through experiences, but a wise man learns from other people’s experiences. And I love that I listen to these guys, and they just didn’t clearly get it. I was able to learn from them and kind of get their knowledge on the past. But I was also able to see that just because you’re an old, educated board member, and have all this experience doesn’t mean you have all the answers, I was able to say to myself, like, wow, you’re actually thinking of something that is good here. And you’re the least experienced person in this room. I think that was kind of a light bulb moment for me to where it was like, you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, you don’t have to be the most experienced person in the room, you just have to have the best idea in the room. And I think that was where I was kind of like, anybody can do anything. Anybody can be an entrepreneur, anybody can create something, stepping out of that comfort zone and not saying, Oh, I have to go through three years of investment banking, and then an MBA and then get out of an MBA and go back into investment banking, and then start another career before I can talk, or think or do anything, you know, anybody can do anything. And so that was that was kind of a lightbulb moment for me. I guess the other thing that I was kind of obsessed with a lot was saving money. I was all about how do I save enough to start my own venture. And I didn’t know what that was exactly right. I didn’t know if it’s gonna be a software company. I didn’t know if it was, you know, going to be some other kind of venture. But I really wanted to save enough money to where I was able to have that opportunity. A couple guys that I had followed and read their stories about how they had done it. You know, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, they’re very famous for, you know, Mark Cuban, he lived in a room or in a house with many different other guys, right. And they saved all their money. And they were always like out there, pitching new ideas and trying to build things. And he wasn’t living a glorious life. He was, you know, sleeping on a couch. But he was saving, he was trying he was innovating. He was he was trying to build things and launching, you know, his streaming network from that Elon Musk, same thing, you know, him and his brother back in the day, they would take turns sleeping, and coding. So you know, one of them would code during the day, sleep into all that. And then while the other one was sleeping, and then they switch and the other one would code, they were very frugal. And that was something that stuck in my mind, I grew up in a kind of a lower income family, to where when we would go to vacations, you know, to see my grandparents, we didn’t have enough money to stay in a hotel. So we would sleep in the car along the way, just about breakeven or a little below breakeven. And those were things that stuck in my mind quite a bit. And so I knew that if I wanted opportunities, I wanted things my parents didn’t have and the ability to go out and create. I had to save all that money. I was very frugal and very conscious on I was making a lot of money, but I was saving almost everything. The reputation and skill thing, I think was very big for me as well, right? You know, investment banking gives you a good reputation. It’s a lot of hard work, you know, not even joking, I was working at least 80 hours, you know, sometimes more in investment banking, mostly was because I put myself in that situation with those two managing directors and just myself it was more challenging than maybe others would have an investment banking, definitely more challenging than it is now. But this the skills and the reputation that I got from that really helped me in other points in my life.
Shawn Flynn 14:34
So when you’re transitioning out of investment banking to the startup world, I mean, you just mentioned the importance of saving money and having some dry gunpowder when you switched over. I mean, you went from this very nice salary to close to nothing. However compensations decided amongst you and your co-founders or general the salaries at that first startup you did and talk about that
Daniel Edwards 14:58
eye opening experience. For me, just not having that income, I had actually saved that money and then was able to invest that money in the first startup, a lot of my life savings or almost all of it, I kind of pushed all the chips into the middle of the table and said, I’m willing to bet on myself. That’s what ended up happening. There are riches to rags story, right, the reverse of rags to riches because I went from making a lot of money to making pretty much nothing. For me, it was almost more like rags to rags. So, you know, I wasn’t living investment banker’s lifestyle while I was an investment banker, but I wasn’t accustomed to that life, and wasn’t meaning that life didn’t have those obligations. I didn’t have a car, my apartment was very decent. I wasn’t buying Gucci or Prada. I just wasn’t accustomed to those things. It was easy for me not to live a lifestyle that was lesser than I was accustomed to. I had just continued to save my money. I mean, I think a lot of people look at my life and kind of laughed at it. When I moved back to San Francisco. I lived in something called an SRO, which is single residency occupants pretty much looked like a decommissioned hotel six, it was very humble. And I stayed there for a long time actually only recently moved out of that apartment. My mindset was still that of the stories I had heard about Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, and others to where it’s like, don’t focus on right now, don’t live your best life right now. dedicate your time and dedicate your money, and all your focus and effort and, and be obsessed about becoming something that you want to become. And so that’s what I had done. I you know, Mark Cuban talks about, basically not having things in his life that would distract him, I was very much along that same kind of line, I didn’t have a TV in my apartment, which is kind of crazy. I didn’t have a video game system, I, I hadn’t had these things that I was kind of accustomed to growing up or wanted or needed, or thought I did. By putting myself in those situations, there was nothing to do but work is a hell maybe inside its own escape. For me, it was actually kind of liberating, you know, it was like I only had one focus. And that focus was to build, I did nothing but build. Fast forward. Now I’ve actually got a nice place. And I am living to you know, learning to live a little bit more like a normal human. It was I definitely was very, very focused. I wasn’t making anything in the startup world, I was more focused on others. And I was myself. And I think that a good leader needs to take care of the pack before they take care of themselves.
Shawn Flynn 17:21
So tell me about that pack. How did you decide who got to join? How to kick them out if they weren’t working? Or was the fire and hire inexperienced? Like, for your startup?
Daniel Edwards 17:34
networking was the number one key, right? You know, you and I run into each other, all over the valley. It’s funny how many people Shawn knows he knows everybody. Yeah, talk to people. And they’re like, Oh, yeah, Shawn, you know, Shawn, I know, Shawn, that’s because you’re such a great networker. And I’d like to think that I’m okay at it. And I’m always striving to get better. It’s incredible to me how small the world is. And I think that you never know, who’s going to swing back around in your life at any given point, and what you could do with them. And so I think, for me, it was just networking like crazy, right? Always going out and meeting people. Even when I was in investment banking, I was joining the boards of companies, I was advising companies, I was trying to do anything I could just get in front of people I know you always kind of used to, you know, be like, what are you doing here, when I’d show up to a Bay Angels or any of the other investor networking events. And it was just me trying to learn and to also provide value if I could, you know, some of the first companies that I started being a board member or being an advisory board member to, they needed finance help, or they needed, model building help, or they needed help raising money. And those were things that I could provide offering you that you know, that service to be able to learn from them the product side, or building an organizing a company operation, all of these things. And so, Gary Vaynerchuk, is he has a book, it’s good, I’d recommend it, give or take, right? It’s kind of the philosophy of it. It’s all about giving, and then eventually asking for something that was kind of my philosophy going into this is like, you never meet somebody in their first meeting is like, Hey, can you do this for me? Because the answer is gonna be no, you know, it’s you want them to see. And this is good for venture capital, too. You want them to see a story, right? You don’t want them to see a snapshot in time. If they see a snapshot in time of one thing you’ve done. They’ve nothing to really put that against in any other knowings of you. But if you show them a whole story that’s more like a movie instead of a picture. They can be like, oh, wow, Daniel was doing this and now he’s here. And they’re like, wow, okay. He does what he says he does, you know, he can do what he says he does. That was I think, you know, something that was important, to me is just getting out of networking. The biggest thing though, is in you have all these opportunities flying at you, and all these people, and then you need to qualify. So now you got your leads, how do you qualify them? And for me, one of the biggest things I stand by ancient agricultural or you can find it in the Bible is in Second Corinthians. It talks about being equally yoked and what that means is back in the day when an oxen would plow a field, there was a yoke that would attach one oxen to the other. And that yoke would then allow those oxen to drive in unison, and plow the field. But if the yoke wasn’t as tight as it was on one of the oxen, or it was misaligned, or something, the job wasn’t done correctly. And for me, in any relationship that I get into, I always think about the equally yoked aspects, or starting a company, that can mean a lot of things, right? Are your work ethics equally? You, you know, is this person going to work as hard as you? What about age, you know, like, are they the same age as you are in a point in their life to where they have to go home and take care of a family, and you just got out of, you know, college, right? Because those are two very different things, I can tell you, there’s no worse feeling in the world than being that person sitting alone in the office, trying to plow the company forward trying to move the mission forward. And no one else is with you. And that’s unequal. I think also fortitude, you know, like, what happens when the going gets tough, you know, is this person built like you, you know, if you have a hardship and you’re running out of money for your startup, are they going to be able to have the iron stomach that you have to be able to get through it to not take a paycheck, you know, maybe this person’s in debt. And if they’re in debt, and you’re not, and they need that paycheck, and you don’t, you can actually, that’s an inquiry, you go into any relationship, whether it’s, you know, romantic, or, you know, whether it’s a business relationship, or even a friendship, and just make sure that you’re equally yoked, because if you’re not, somebody is always going to be giving, someone’s always going to be taking, and you want that unison partnership to where it’s like, give and take together in unison. So that’s kind of the things I think about when you know, I think about team members, and who do I want on my team, you know, I want somebody that’s equally yoked.
Shawn Flynn 21:48
And then other than hiring, or finding those team members that are equally yoked, everyone’s working together in unison to solve these problems? What were some of the early struggles that you came across?
Daniel Edwards 21:59
You probably have stories. And I know I have a ton of stories about getting into relationships where you were unequal yoke, that is the number one burden. And people say that all the time, right? Like what’s your startup fail, our product didn’t hit or you know, financials weren’t there something probably not the case is probably stems back to being unequally yoked with the founding team, you can almost do anything, if you’re on the same page is someone else. And that’s at least what I’ve learned and experienced, or you are on the same page to call it quits. financials are a huge thing, right? And it’s very interesting to always listen to somebody talk about their company, and how what do they say, first, we’ve raised, you know, hundred million in venture capital money, we have 2 billion in revenue, or you know, whatever the number is, right. And if they don’t talk about their product, and they don’t talk about their customer experience, and what they’re doing for the customer, it’s probably a red flag. When I go, and I’m either investing in something, or joining a team, you know, whether it’s board member or full time, I want to hear whoever’s the visionary of the product, talk about it. And if it’s all about financials, if it’s all like, basically Wall Street mumbo jumbo, right, doing this, and we’ve grown this, and we’ve done that, and they’re not talking about their product, they’re not talking about who they’re servicing, they’re not talking about their customers are just so excited about the product that they can’t stop talking about it. It’s kind of a red flag. Once you get past that point. And you know, the team is equally yoked, you’re driven on a mission to make a good product, and you have a good product, then I also think that it’s been about aesthetics. So I’ve been in companies to where the product was phenomenal. You know, we had a great software stack, or we had a great product. But it was all the back end was really good and really strong. And the front end wasn’t it’s like having a sports car engine in a junkyard car body. And if you look at a junkyard car body, and you’re like, wow, that car looks really rusted. You know, the seats are all ripped up looks looks horrible, you know, looks homeless person lives in there something I don’t want anything to do with that. You go and open up the hood, and it’s got a Ferrari engine. Okay, well, I’ve never would have guessed that. And there’s so many startups that have a junkyard body and a Ferrari engine. And it’s because they’re really good at building the API. They’re really good at building the core software, but they don’t know how to wrap it, you know, they don’t know how to put it in a box in a container to where it’s like, Wow, that’s a Ferrari. Right. And it’s got a Ferrari engine. And so I think for me, you know, one of the biggest struggles that I had is working with technology innovators, that didn’t understand that we can get into stories of competitors and things that I’ve had happen to me later on. But you know, that that’s a huge thing is the aesthetics of the product. We’re very visual culture, you know, people are all about aesthetics and visual appeal. And if you’re not just looking at that in in giving that person, the visual appeal that makes them question to say I want more, I want to know more and then you’re not going to get past the first step. So that was really difficult. I think also sales team here in Silicon Valley. People are really good at building things, right? But they’re really bad at selling things, it almost takes a different kind of person come in and sell things. And a lot of the times the salesperson is an equally yoked with the technology person has their own very different goals, very different personalities, just very different missions. That has been something that’s been really difficult for, for me, you know, is like, how do you balance between being an innovator, and entrepreneur, but also selling. And so for me, personally, that’s been rolling up my sleeves, you know, I’m not a professional salesperson. But I can tell you in the startup that we have now, I’ve made almost every sale for us. And at least in the early days, other ventures I’ve done, you know, I was the person who won the biggest clients who went out and met those people. And I did it the same way that I got that internship, you know, I would just cold call, this is what I have to offer you, I’d love to you know, have some of your time, I’ll give you this for free. I’ll spend some time with you and see if I can help you not getting not being like, Oh, I’m the finance guy, or I’m the operations person or I’m you know, whatever, right, step outside of that box and wear all those hats. You know, it’s kind of a joke in Silicon Valley, that we always say I’m wearing many hats. But not a lot of people actually are, you know, it’s very rare to find somebody who’s actually making the sales on the product meetings, you know, innovating on the product side, who’s spending time with the technology team, who’s spending time with finance in the operations team. And who knows it all right. Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank will always say what’s your numbers, right, you know, your business, the thing that I find is people don’t they know one aspect of their business, but they don’t know how to get out and learn the other aspects. And I don’t know if it’s whether they can they can, or they just they don’t the effort in and what I’ve, I’ve been in experiences to where they don’t put the effort in, you know, you need to get out of that mind frame, frame of mind and just kind of say, I can do anything, you know, that I put time and effort into.
Shawn Flynn 26:53
So I think you set up the next question, what lessons have you learned from your competitor.
Daniel Edwards 27:00
I’ve been beat on that on a personal level, you know, I still have a chip on my shoulder to this day about it. We had a competitor once where they had a, this was a back-end software company, they were selling a product, very similar to ours, that product was a basically like a big data analytics tool. And they were able to hire more salespeople, build a nice-looking front end, very static front end, you know, very nice website, the back-end technology was junk, it was absolute trash. And anybody that was a technologist looking at that could tell, they were able to hire all the fancy salespeople, hire all the great UI UX designers to make it look good on the front end, when you got to API calls. That was another story. They were able to beat us, you know, and they became like a half a billion dollar company from this, and they went out and they bought big trade booths. And you know, sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, but they really Blitz the market by basically going out and making that happen. And having, you know, a Ferrari body, but with a junkyard car motor, they did the opposite approach, right. And that will come back and bite you, at some point, it can get you a half a billion dollars, if you don’t have the sports car body, have a nice looking body. But you know, that quarterback product that you’re building and working on should be strong as well. I’m much more visually aware of the products that I’m building. You know, like Steve Jobs was obviously obsessed with everything right on a visual aspect. He was right to be, you know, some aspects. I mean, it’s we are such a visual creature, you know that, if you don’t see something, and fall in love with it, the chances are, you know that you buy it, or you engage with it, or you want anything to do with it, it’s very low. A story that I learned is just, if you think something is beautiful, like on the back-end technology, and you can be in love with it from a software perspective, make sure that somebody who isn’t aware of what that is, can look at it with minimal knowledge and say, Wow, that’s really cool. Because I would have guaranteed if we would have spent more time to work on our UI and our UX and the look of the product on the front end, people would have made assumptions just like they did that other company, that it was a good product. Because if you look at something and it looks good, you assume it’s good. It doesn’t have to be, you know, it can look visually appealing, and be a piece of chalk. That’s the lesson that I learned is just make sure you just appeal to the lowest common denominator. You know, these CEOs, these salespeople don’t really know, the back end, you know, they may know some of the buzzwords, they don’t know how to test the API, you know, they don’t know how to go in and look at the software in a real stance, you know, and make a judgment call on it. They just like see, Ooh, wow, pretty visuals. You know, like, this looks nice. Looks expensive, you know? Yeah, we’ll buy it. Big deal. Right. So I obviously would have loved for us to have a better aesthetic appeal to the software and we didn’t, that’s okay. You know, we were able to raise the money. And the reason that we were able to raise that amount of money was that we were solving a problem for customers that They needed salt. And people build just to build, and they don’t build to solve a problem. I’m much more excited about the company that I’m working on now than this one that we raise $40 million for, because there’s a real problem, and we’re solving something that is incredible. And I’ve seen it firsthand, I’ve never had a person, beg for our product as they are now. And, you know, I’ve read about it knows that it’s kind of a fairy tale. You know, back to this other company, we didn’t have people banging down the door for the product, it’s not necessarily a red flag, sure, a heck of a lot harder to, to sell the product and to sell division. One, if your team is equally yoked, they’re going to love that, you know, this, Shawn, they always talk about the team. What is the founding team? Look, you know, what are they? What do they consist of? How long have they known each other? You know, what have they done that will make them the people to solve this problem? That’s a big question. Right? So if you’re equally yoked, you’re all on the same page. You all are expert. That’s key number one, right? Then it’s like, Okay, well, what is this team build. And so if you’re building a product, and people are knocking down the door to get to that product, or you have good customer testimonial, that’s really good. And so if those two things are happening, and more and more people are engaging with you and engaging with your product, you’re probably going to win at some level. we pivoted a lot. There was always kind of an inner company struggle of were we a b2c company, or were we a b2b company. And the founders of that company, you know, are the some of the team members with me that had founded a company previously. And they built a really incredible b2b, you know, business to business software offering, they were able to sell that very successful, then, you know, they had kind of decided they wanted to build like a b2c product. And I personally thought that was a mistake. I kind of wanted to rinse and repeat. We built this b2b product before and sold. Why can’t we just do that again, b2c is very sexy, you never hear about the b2b companies, or you rarely do you know, if you’re in Silicon Valley, you may hear about, you know, facilely, or zoom, or you know, zoom is more, b2c, but you never hear about facilely, or these others, right. And that’s because they’re servicing their servicing businesses. But you hear about b2c companies like zoom, and everybody wants to be the zoom, everybody wants to be the one that you tell them, I work, or I founded this company, and everyone’s like, oh, wow, I love that product, or I use that product. Nobody wants to be the b2b and b2b is hard. But if you know how to do enterprise sales, you can do very well, we’re in a position to where we pivoted from b2c to b2b. And then we kind of had to reimagine our product at that standpoint, which we had built all the backend technology that was great for a b2b business. But we were trying to operate it ourselves, which was a mistake. And when we kind of turned the tables and said, here’s a software product, let’s give it to people who can actually operate it on a higher level. They have higher marketing budgets, they have whole teams and departments and analytic departments that can go and run this software, then that’s when we started to succeed. Also, it was out of the box thinking, and there’s a quote that I liked, it says it, the canvas constrains your painting, which basically means that, you know, if you have a small Canvas, and you’re trying to paint your picture, it can only be so big, I think for us, we had to pull out a bigger canvas and say, there’s a bigger picture to be painted here. And that’s what we did. And that bigger picture was the b2b focus, and then also incorporating cryptocurrency and blockchain. And we had been a profitable off chain or no chain, you know, company just kind of a normal database solution company. But by incorporating this blockchain technology into our current offering, and supplementing it, we kind of created this bigger canvas and this bigger picture that we were painting, which was more appealing to a wider audience. And so we were able to kind of reimagine ourselves from there. And that’s what really opened the door. You know, we went out and we did something strategic with a sports institution, you know, in the world that kind of allowed us to kind of be on the tips of tongues of everybody in the crypto and blockchain space. Once we got that visual appeal, changed, you know, to where we were the junkyard car, to where we were, then the sports car that everybody wanted to interact with, and talk about and partner with, completely changed the game. It was all about perception. In the world of starting a business, you often have this perception that whatever you’re building is beautiful. And it’s your darling, there’s no such thing as an ugly baby. Oh, there’s ugly babies, right? It’s just not an ugly baby. If you’re the mother or the father, sometimes you need that outside perspective, you know, see the forest through the trees kind of thing to say, this is an ugly baby. And you know, we had an ugly baby, it wasn’t good. You know, we were able to kind of reinvent ourselves and reimagine what the company was. And that took us to the next level, because once we change our visual appeal, and our story and the canvas that we were painting on, and everyone could see the picture in this new painting that we had painted, it completely changed the game. And that’s how we were able to raise that 40 million.
Shawn Flynn 34:57
So you had mentioned a sports team. sponsorship there, you got to go into more detail what that agreement was the decision to do it.
Daniel Edwards 35:07
Basically what we had done is we’ve taken a gamble to sponsor major league sports team. So back in 2016, the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain was very crowded, it was about to get much more crowded, but we were pretty early on. And we were able to kind of be out there and be one of the major players in our space within blockchain. But we needed to wave the flag and go back to my old analogy, we needed to create a bigger picture. And we needed to pull out the biggest canvas that we could, what we did there is we ended up deciding to sponsor a major league sports team. And we thought about basketball, NBA, we thought about NFL, we thought about call, we thought about formula f1. Racing, what has the biggest worldwide appeal. And also, if you remember, I said that this company was headquartered in London, and in San Francisco. So we had a lot of European, Asian Europe focus customers, that’s where we were kind of based in trying to attract for customers and for talent for people to join our team. For us, it was a no brainer to do soccer or football over there. We ended up going to the Premier League in London, since we’re headquartered in London. And we ended up going between two different teams and in picking Arsenal Football Club, is, you know, Arsenal is a huge soccer team, we ended up doing branding around the pitch there, and getting really good partnership with Arsenal, we were able to do that as we took a gamble. It wasn’t cheap to do that partnership from a time and effort, you know, just a whole overall investment of the company. It wasn’t easy to do that very time consuming, but we provided value to Arsenal and Arsenal definitely provided value to us. And I think that when you can have that two-way value stream like I talked about earlier, it’s huge. I think if we were before we had reimagined ourselves and re envisioned ourselves, we would have come to Arsenal, they would have said No way, we were able to re envision ourselves and come to them in a way where we were interesting to them, right, we provided value to them. We were this early on blockchain company that was able to be forward thinking and what we were doing, and to say, we can offer you exposure to this industry, we can make you the first major league sports team in the world to sponsor and work with a blockchain company. And that’s what happened. And when we did that, you know, we were on the cover of BBC, we were on the cover of Sports Illustrated, you know, we were everywhere. And I think if we weren’t a software company and weren’t able to regulate the traffic coming to our website, your servers probably would have crashed, we went from zero to hero automatically. That was just invaluable for us as a company. I pretty much spent the next year and a half or so traveling around the world speaking at blockchain, crypto conferences and FinTech conferences. And I was able to do that because the company was known, I became kind of known by association with that. And I was able to get stage time I was able to get keynote, speaking also helped with raising the 40 million and it elevated us all to this certain level. And it was a snowball effect of we made strategic decisions to rebrand ourselves in a way to where people had a different story of us because by this time, we’d been around like four or five years, we weren’t a new company at all, it was hard to kind of brush off that old perspective of who we were to who we wanted to become. And I think that once we kind of showed that an arsenal saw that and they got behind that, you know, it was exciting for them. And it was for sure exciting for us. I got to go to a bunch of Arsenal games and ate a suite there. And it was it was really fun.
Shawn Flynn 38:34
So with all this momentum, how did you know it’s time to move on to another idea,
Daniel Edwards 38:40
This equal yoke concept. I just think that the team at a certain point became unequally yoked. There’s a great quote from an NBA coach where he says that, you know, coaching a team is very easy before it wins a championship. It’s all about this team working together, whether it’s the Warriors or the heat, you know, before they won their championships, or the Lakers. And it’s easy to work with a team where everyone’s humble and everyone’s hungry to win, then once you start winning, it becomes a totally different story. People think that they’re worth more, you know, go back to Kobe and Shaq. They couldn’t work together because Kobe thought he was more valuable than Shaq. Shaq thought he was more valuable than Kobe. And they had to go off to their different teams. And you know, then you talk about the Warriors, right? It’s like, Kevin Durant thinks he’s more valuable than these other people. And you know, it’s just LeBron James. And you can see it everywhere, right? Every time somebody starts winning, they always think that they’re more valuable than the team that got them there. And I’m a big proponent on wheat in every address or email or anything where I’m talking about the team, or what we’re doing. I very, ever rarely say I did this, you know, I accomplish this. I did that little hard in a podcast not to say I but I always say we, you know, we as a team do this. We as a team have done this. And I think that that’s really important. And I think that I got into situations to where We were unequally yoked, we didn’t have the same goal, I started to lose the drive and the passion for what we were going to accomplish. Because even though we had created this big, beautiful picture on this bigger Canvas, we both had different stories of where we wanted to go with it. The unison drive that we had was coming apart. And I think that that’s kind of when you know, when you start to see we’re unequally yoked, we’re not having the same dreams, or the same beliefs or the same vision that we had, we were on two different paths. For me, it was a little bit more easier than maybe the traditional person. Just think about the product is the product good. Our customers liking it, you know, are people coming to you and saying, you built something incredible. And if the team isn’t going well, if you know, you’re not excited and not passionate about it anymore, and then customers aren’t saying this is a good product, and they’re not knocking down or to get the product, it’s probably time to reevaluate. Those are all things that come together. You know, another thing that is kind of interesting, I would go to these blockchain conferences, and some people knew who I was, some people didn’t. But I would go to these booths and hopefully hope that they hadn’t seen me speak or anything. And I’d say, Oh, hi, I’m new to crypto blockchain. Can you tell me like, I see that you’re trying to build the Uber for blockchain? You heard the Uber that’s built on blockchain. Can you just tell me a little bit about that? And yeah, they’d give me their 32nd pitch. And then I’d say, what is the blockchain? You know, I just, I don’t really know, I’m just trying to learn, and they’d give me an answer. And I’m like, wow, they don’t know what the blockchain is. In, you know, I’d go around to these different things. And I’d find the Airbnb built on blockchain. The Zillow built on blockchain, you name it, Silicon Valley company built on blockchain. They were all there. You know, they were just it was LinkedIn built on blockchain. And they didn’t know what they’re talking about. I think when you get into an industry as well, you need to look around your environment and say, are the people that I’m surrounded with leaders and thinkers? Or are they followers, and when anything gets super popular, whether it’s artificial intelligence, whether it’s blockchain, whether it’s any kind of just tech trend, or even outside of tech, you know, whether it’s like street wear? Do these people know what they’re talking about? And are they leaders? Are they innovators? Are they thinkers? Or are they just follow on people, you know, bandwagon nurse, I started to notice that a lot of these people in the crypto space were just bandwagon fans. And they weren’t actually creating useful or valuable technology. It was a money grab, you know, they were just there to get money. I also didn’t see crypto or blockchain anytime soon going mainstream. You know, when you go home, and you ask your mom or your grandma, like, what is blockchain? Or what is cryptocurrency? Or could you ever use this, and they’re just confused and scratching their head, and they don’t know what it is, that’s a really bad sign. I mean, it has to be the lowest common denominator has to know how to use something that goes for something, even if it isn’t as complicated as blockchain. You know, if you’re building an app, that’s a new credit card, and people don’t know how to sign up for it, or they don’t know how to use it, or they don’t know how to interact with you at all, and how to get it going. It’s not gonna work. You know, we’re really good in Silicon Valley about building over complicated technology. That doesn’t work for anyone except the creators of the technology itself, I had taken a step back. And now I’m in the legacy payment space working with technology that works, working with technology that, you know, people understand, and they know how it works. And my thinking there was that it was time to move into something that people understood more, and keep a tab on the blockchain and crypto space, and be able to move into that or add that as an additional offering if we needed to in the future. So right now, you know, the company I’m working on is providing SEPA, which is a payment rails network in in Europe, and we’re providing those transfers of money in and out to traditional businesses. It’s a business-to-business software platform that that provides those payment services. And my thinking is that now that we are a profitable, strong company, if we ever need to, and see the time for blockchain or crypto technology coming into play, and our customers are asking for that product, I’ll build it. But I think it was a mistake. And I felt like I was kind of just like turning my wheels going nowhere stuck in the mud, trying to build a product for people that didn’t fully understand it, surrounded by people who completely didn’t understand it. And were just selling snake oil. For me. It was a little personal, but a little also the unevenly yoked not being able to know that I could fulfill the dreams or visions of what we had with the team that we had. And those are all those people on that team. They’re all great individuals. They’re all very smart. And they’re the you know, they can all do great things, and have done great things, but put us all in the situation where we were working towards a mission that wasn’t, you know, something that we knew we could all be successful at in the future, or at least you could if we went one way, but then that wasn’t going to fulfill some of the other people on the team. There were definitely paths that needed to be gone down. It was just good for me to personally kind of, you know, go away from that and then also we got the opportunity of selling in the company, so it was kind of perfect timing. I personally got lucky.
Shawn Flynn 45:04
Can you share with us one or two stories of maybe successes or failures and why it was a success or why it was a fail.
Daniel Edwards 45:14
Some of the problems are, we talked about them a little bit, but it’s like, good product, but the customers don’t care if products are good, but the products aren’t engaging the customer for the right reason. And it doesn’t really matter. It’s you need to build something that’s solving a problem for somebody, you get into this field of dreams scenario. It’s like build it, and they will come newsflash, they never come. If they do, it’s a fluke, I think that you need to be in a solution mindset to where you’re solving a problem for someone. And I know you hear that all the time. But an example of what I’m doing now, we had a problem to where people needed to send money, and I needed to, even with my last company, send money across Europe, and I needed something fast, reliable, easy to use, and cheap. And I wasn’t getting a lot of good solutions for that. And you think, Wow, well, it seems like there would be a lot of solutions out there. Well, it’s like, as an American, who’s also spending a good amount of time in London, what happens if I’m in America, and I need to set up a new bank account or send money or it’s very, very troublesome, we ended up building a product that basically we got a type of banking license, you know, in Europe, that allowed us to offer these facilities to businesses, like I was solving a problem for a business that I was, that needed that solution, we built it slowly, we kind of you know, with our with our own team had been in that same situation as well. And then we were able to build a product and a solution that fit for what we needed. And so we were kind of our own test guinea pigs, which was great. And that built a successful product situation where we built great products, but no one cared, right? It just, it was a build it and they will come scenario, and they never came. And it’s very hard to work with somebody and say, I will build you something you will love. And they’ll go Okay, we’ll come back to me when it’s built. And then you come back to them. And they’re like, Oh, well, that’s not really a problem for us anymore. You know, what you want is you want somebody who’s like banging down your door saying, solve this problem for me, I need you to solve this. And you’re like, Okay, solve it together, tell me what you need. What do you need me to build? You know, let’s, let’s go through it all. And then you’re working with them and solving that problem in real time. And that’s hard to do. But if you do that, it’s pretty much guaranteed success, you know, and then it’s a whole another story of how can you scale that and build that to a real company. That was just hard. I’ve also been in scenarios where it’s been a good product, the environment was too regulated, or it was too compliant driven, I advised a company that was in the medical space, you know, with my medical background, I was telling them like, great, it’s a great product. And what you guys have built here is incredible. But you realize how hard this is to get in here. All these all these companies have this lockdown, there’s lobbyists, there’s big supply chains, like it’s very hard to disrupt this industry, we went for it, we went forward, and we tried anyways, it was very difficult, you know, it’s just good product couldn’t get past the hurdle. You know, this like barrier to entry that these companies have built. The one that we kind of talked about with the junkyard car with the with the sports car body was a good product, poor presentation, you can have a great product, but poor presentation ruins the whole thing. It’s all about just getting a great product, make sure you have the demand from customers, make sure that people want your solution, having an okay product with a bad team. And with customers that don’t care, it’s going nowhere. Make sure your customers are crazy about it. Sure your team is equally yoked and the culture is good there because you have staying power on that side. And then just make sure that you’re building and enhancing on that product that they love. That’s kind of what has worked is make sure that you’re passionate and building something for the customer, and not for yourself.
Shawn Flynn 48:52
So the company you’re at right now, you actually started as an investor in that company. But now you’re the CEO, tell us about how that happened.
Daniel Edwards 49:01
From my perspective, I went there to London for what I thought was going to be about a week and a half, I ended up staying two and a half months close to three months in a hotel. Because I got there. It was basically a dumpster fire. We had no revenue, a poor product, we weren’t thinking about the customer. It was much worse than I thought it was. I was running another company previously. And I was pretty much a passive investor. And when we had sold that company and moved on, I was the same gentleman that was a seed investor in my last company as a seed investor in this company. So I joined him as being you know, part of that group. I talked about me going to London checking this out. When we got there. It was very old school culture, meaning I’m the boss, everyone else’s the underlings is just not very innovative, which is the worst, maybe the last thing you want with a startup. I ended up restructuring the whole company. We got rid of more than half of the people and we started from square one. One thing that I like in Aristotle’s first principles, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with Elon Musk likes Others, Peter Thiel has talked about it a lot. It goes over in Peter TEALS, book zero to one, if you want to check it out. It’s all about deriving a problem to its core principles, if you’re going to like Elon’s story is really interesting, right? He wanted to build a rocket for SpaceX. And so he thought, how do I build a rocket? What is the minimal components that go into building a rocket, and he broke it down into that, so he tried to buy a rocket from the old USSR, you know, Russian Federation, and it didn’t work. And so he ended up building his own, and they found out it was actually cheaper, better, more durable, and could launch the rocket more times if he actually built the rocket himself in started from that kind of square one, and went back to the basic principles, right, the first principles, Aristotle talks about this to a lot. That’s what I did. You know, I’m a big believer in that just because somebody has built something doesn’t mean it’s the way it should be. I went back to the core problem of what are we trying to solve? What are we trying to do? And what do these customers need, in a rebuilding our product, we ended up rebuilding and visualizing the way that we were doing it, pulled out another Canvas, and started painting a different story. I’m pretty excited where we’re at, we went from zero to now we’re profitable, we’re going to do about 2 billion in payments this year. And the biggest and most important thing is, customers love us, we have them pounding down the door to get our product, I’m excited, because Funny enough, I got into the same situation to where we were kind of a junkyard car with a Ferrari engine again, right? In a couple months here, we’re gonna launch kind of the Ferrari body or the sports car body to match that Ferrari engine. And so I’m, you know, taking things that I’ve learned in the past have that visual appeal and things such as like just signing up for the accounts on the website, tracking it and sending it back, reengagement emails, all very basic stuff, not everybody knows this, right? Those are the things that I kind of learned there, it was just very important for me to have a culture and a team that was like equally yoked people that left the company, they didn’t care about that. It was good for both of us, it was good for us, and it was good for them. You don’t align with the vision of what we’re fighting towards what we’re working towards every day, blood, sweat, and tears. And you probably shouldn’t be here, the team is more happy than they’ve ever been. And we’re all working together more than we ever have. I’m seeing people put in extra hours, put in extra enthusiasm, basically, customer service representatives are coming to me with ideas, right and saying, I think we could do this better, I think different things that we could elaborate on or grow or expand on. And that’s what I want it right. I wanted anybody you know, I don’t care if you’re the CEO, I don’t care if you’re the janitor, I want you and me to be talking and how do we make this company better. And I think before it was a very top-down culture. And I like to kind of make it flat to where it’s like we’re all interacting and working with each other. And that’s very much what we’re doing. Now. The power of we like what I was talking about that has changed everything as well, as a leader, you should be giving credit to other people. And you should be taking as little credit as possible. And when anything comes at your way. That’s bad. And you’re taking it on and you’re solving it. Gary Vee says, you know, you’re kind of like a firefighter, you know, you’re drinking from a firehose, as the CEO, you know, you’re putting out fires, but then all the problems come to you. It’s true. It’s like it’s not very glamorous job at all. Yeah, the title is cool, you actually have the worst job because you know, you get none of the credit, almost all the time. And you get all the problems. For me, I like that I’m kind of weird that way. It’s been a really great story. I’m really excited of the progress that we’ve made. And I think that where we’re going from here, it’s really exciting to be a part of something where everyone is on the same page, everyone is pushing towards the same thing. And customers love you, and you’re adding success. I think this is the most fun I’ve ever had.
Shawn Flynn 53:38
So what do you think are some of the big breakthroughs in FinTech in the coming years?
Daniel Edwards 53:43
The United States is hard, basically, between lobbyists and big banks, in the whole environment of banking in the United States, they’ve closed off innovation a lot, you’ll see this, where they try to do open banking or faster payments technology in the United States. And it’s not working. And the reason it’s not working is, you know, the big banks are kind of making sure it’s not working, you know, you still have your like square cash app. Some other things that are kind of interesting. chime is doing some very cool things. But they’re kind of piggybacking off of banking licenses from other people. And so for me, personally, I’m excited about playing Europe, Europe has really opened the floodgates to technology and innovation. You know, for us, for example, where we have what’s called an E money institution license right now, we are hopefully upgrading to a full banking license here in Europe in the next year. And that’s something that I couldn’t even imagine us doing in the United States. It’s just so rigorous. It’s a state-by-state issue. This is very difficult. I’m playing and I’m learning in Europe, and I’m hoping that the environment will change in the United States. But if it doesn’t, I’ve already kind of built a pretty solid foundation in playing in the UK and the European markets and Asia is starting to kind of open up a little bit Canada is kind of looking at some technology and regulation that would open up kind of the FinTech universe for companies like mine, but I don’t necessarily Think blockchain is going to be this big, huge, you know, thing that comes in and your grandma’s using it and all that, unless central banks adopt, you know, these currencies and issue them themselves, I think that we can still get better on things that we’re doing. I think defragmenting the banks has been something huge in Europe. They’re kind of taking all the different services that a bank offers, whether it’s lending, whether it’s cards, whether it’s, you know, actual traditional payment, rail systems like what we’re doing, they’re providing those services better, cheaper and faster than the bank would. And so I think you’re going to continue to see this bank, the fragmentation happening. That’s the trend that, you know, we’re on and that we’re exploring. And I think that the US ever opens up, you’ll see that but I think that decoupling and defragmenting the banks is kind of the thing that you’re going to see for the next 510 years in FinTech. I think it’s interesting, interesting. Also see if all those FinTechs that come out and defragment, the banks get bought up by the banks and come right back into them. Just kind of in case if you look at something like simple banking in the United States, they got bought by BBVA, come out of the bank and create a better product come right back into the bank. It’s interesting. And banks historically are bad at creating new products, right, JP Morgan tried to launch a bank for kids. And that went nowhere. They shut that product down pretty quickly. I think these big banks need this push from FinTechs, like us, and the United States is just such a hard environment to work in.
Shawn Flynn 56:28
And with that, anyone wants to find out more information about you, your company, what you’re working on, what’s the best way to go about doing that?
Daniel Edwards 56:36
Yeah, sure. So my LinkedIn is d w e, and just search for that, or Daniel Edwards on LinkedIn, and should be able to find me, I’m pretty open to taking LinkedIn messages and whether you want to talk to me about, you know, collaboration, board advisory seats, or board roles, I’m, I’m always open opportunities. I’m kind of under the philosophy of hear what comes to you and then you know, evaluate and analyze from there and then pick what works for you. I’m pretty happy on what I’m doing now. And I’m happy to share that with others if you know, they have career experience or other things that they want to learn or just collaboration in general.
Shawn Flynn 57:11
Fantastic. We’ll have that information in the show notes. And Daniel Edward, I want to thank you for being on the Silicon Valley podcast and for audience out there. Please like write a review on iTunes share in your network. It helps us encourages us to create great content like this in the future. So Daniel, once again, thank you for being on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Daniel Edwards 57:31
Yeah, Shawn, thank you so much, everybody, check out this podcast. Sean is great. He’s a super networker, so you ever want to get a guy in front of you that knows the whole Silicon Valley, podcast and space in general Shawn’s your guy, he’s well connected.
Shawn Flynn 57:46
Thank you, Daniel.
Announcer 57:49
Thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at the Silicon Valley podcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
