Ignite Startups: How Adam Nash Built Daffy Into a $1B Donor-Advised Fund Platform | Ep281

**Adam Nash** (0:00)
So I got the question once, it was like, what does a CEO do? As it turns out, there's hundreds of things. And if you're doing startups, there's no job too small for you. You're doing all the little things in the beginning. But my answer at that time was, I said at the highest level, I think CEOs of startups do three things. I think they set the strategy for the company. They find the right people to execute on that strategy, and then they make sure that the team has the resources to execute.
At some level, if you get those three things right, you can do a hundred other things wrong and move along, but that probably just reflects my philosophy about how you build organizations that stand the test of time.

**Brian Bell** (0:58)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we're delighted to have Adam Nash on the mic. He spent two decades building consumer financial products people actually use. He was VP of product at LinkedIn through his IPO, President and CEO of Wealthfront, and VP of product at Dropbox, with earlier stops at eBay and Apple. Since 2011, he's been one of Silicon Valley's most active angels early in Figma, Gusto, Opendoor, Firebase, and many others. In 2020, he co-founded Daffy, the donor-advised fund for you, which crossed a billion dollars in charitable assets in about four and a half years. Pretty amazing. Thanks for coming on, Adam.

**Adam Nash** (1:30)
Yeah, Brian. Great to be here.

**Brian Bell** (1:32)
Yeah. I put you on the spot before and said, hey, we actually know each other. I interviewed at Wealthfront 10 years ago. I didn't get the job, but I had a real good time in the interview process. I remember it being a really fun interview.

**Adam Nash** (1:44)
Well, I'm glad it was a good experience. I mean, Wealthfront was a very special moment. It was one of the really early companies that managed to scale in fintech, and I was a big believer, still am, that culture is so important. And so, the process of how you bring people on board, I think, tends to be underappreciated by a lot of operators. But it's this one window you have to kind of introduce people to the company and culture. And you have to remember that every person you talk to, whether or not they get the job, has an impression of your company. And so, similar to my advice on building brands and products, very often people don't think enough about the people who haven't used their product yet versus their active users.

**Brian Bell** (2:27)
And I told, you know, I had such a good interview experience and went on to do other things, you know, leading AI at Amazon and working at Microsoft. So, it's not like I set back my career and not getting the job. But I had a really good experience. And I remember just telling people from then on about Wealthfront. I was like, you know, when people would talk about finance or investments, and like check out Wealthfront. So yeah, that positive experience kind of probably paid some dividends and probably got some customers from my network over the years.

**Adam Nash** (2:52)
Yeah, that's actually great to hear. Like I said, it's one of my long-standing kind of startup, kind of building a brand and culture things, as I always told the head of recruiting and, you know, all the hiring managers that like, I want everyone leaving the company, whether or not they get the job, understanding what we do and why we do it, and feeling good about the company.

**Brian Bell** (3:10)
Yeah, that's amazing. That's so funny to cross paths again, but I'd love to just start with, what's your origin story and background?

**Adam Nash** (3:16)
Well, there's a lot of versions of that. I mean, I have pretty diverse interests, although I think that if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it looks pretty standard. Software engineer builds a career in Silicon Valley, going from one tech wave to another. But you mentioned FinTech and financial products in general. When I look at that, I mean, it goes back a long ways.
I remember my grandmother retired while I was in college, and no one ever really had taught me about money. And so I remember my first internship where I actually earned some money. I think I earned about $2,200 a month, which at the time was an unbelievable sum. This is like the 90s, right?

**Brian Bell** (3:52)
Yeah. So it's, yeah.

**Adam Nash** (3:55)
And then what happened is I went through the fall quarter, and then after buying a new computer, probably for too much money, and a little speddy here and there, I realized after Thanksgiving, I had less than $1,000 less. And I was like, oh my God, I can't believe I went through all that money. And so I started on this process of learning about money. And my grandmother, who had just retired, she was into certificates of deposit, and she was the type of person who did their taxes just with their pencil and paper, all the calculators by hand. She was amazingly gifted that way, and she taught in school. And so I started learning about mutual funds and returns and all these different things. I actually talk about her a bit. I teach this class at Stanford now, Personal Finance for Engineers. It's based on some of those learnings. But when I think about it academically, I ended up focusing my graduate school on human computer interaction, which is really just the study of the rational, which is computers, right? Ones and zeros. And we'll always do the same thing.