Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Hello, Acquired listeners. Today's episode is with Plaid CEO, Zach Perret. You are probably familiar with Plaid as the bank linking service that lets you link your bank account to other bank accounts and FinTech apps. They have had a pretty insane journey where in 2020, they agreed to be purchased by Visa for $5.3 billion. Plaid then terminated this deal after the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit to block it. And the few years since then have been pretty wild too. They were valued as high as $14 billion than a recent fundraising round of $6 billion. So more than the Visa acquisition, but of course lower than the sky-high valuation in between. Today's conversation with Zach is about weathering all of that and about Plaid's actual business they were building along the way, growing, diversifying and finding ways to leverage all the data that they have to build a better and more modern finance ecosystem.
Well, one quick announcement before we start. As many of you know, we are doing a massive live show at the 6,000 seat Radio City Music Hall in New York City on July 15th with our friends at JP Morgan Payments. There are just a few seats left, so make sure to get yours before they are gone at acquired.fm slash nyc. The evening is going to be awesome. We can't wait to see you there July 15th. That's acquired.fm slash nyc. So, please enjoy our conversation with Zach Perret, the co-founder and CEO of Plaid.

**David Rosenthal** (1:28)
Zach, welcome to the show.

**Zach Perret** (1:30)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to get to do this. I'm a big fan of everything acquired, so thank you.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
Thank you for listening. We've enjoyed following your journey through the wild turns of events that have happened over the last five years or so. You were a high-flying unicorn, and then I saw some news that said you were acquired by Visa, and then I saw some news that said you weren't, and then you raised a lot of money at a big valuation, and then you raised more money later at a lower valuation, all while growing the business and then starting new business lines that I bet most people are totally not familiar with, and they just think of Plaid as, isn't that the way that I auth my fintech app to connect to a bank account? Does that seem like a reasonable summary of your life over the last five years?

**Zach Perret** (2:14)
Yes, very reasonable summary. They say that startups are like a roller coaster. Indeed, it doesn't end, it just keeps going. The magnitude gets even larger. It's been an awesome journey and a lot of learnings and a lot of fun and a lot of frustration along the way too. You get your fair share of everything.

**David Rosenthal** (2:30)
Maybe to start, take us back to January 2020 and your partnership with Visa. Catch us up from there.

**Zach Perret** (2:40)
For a podcast that's called Acquired, you don't talk a lot about acquisitions.

**David Rosenthal** (2:44)
No, this is like a throwback episode for us.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:46)
Yeah, but this acquisition didn't happen, so ultimately...

**Zach Perret** (2:51)
That is true, that is very true. All right, so in January of 2020, I think it was January 18th or 19th of 2020, we announced that Visa was acquiring Plaid for a big valuation. It was just about $5 billion.
This was the culmination of a lot of back and forth over the past three to four months. Visa had been an investor, they showed interest in acquiring us, there had been some other acquisition interests as well. We ended up making the very difficult, but at the time very logical decision to sell the Visa, we announced it to our team on January of 2020 And I remember because this is the last big all hands that we did in the office. Our office, it's the ex-Atlasian office and it has these gigantic stairs that people can sit on. And so, you know, it's a two-floor staircase, it's super wide, probably like 30, 40 feet wide, just filled with people. We were planning this all hands and I remember right before the all hands, the news leaked. And so, all of our news addicted team saw it and the others that were not as news addicted were like, what's going on? Why is there so much buzz? What's happening?

**Ben Gilbert** (3:56)
Do you know who leaked it?

**Zach Perret** (3:58)
You never know. I mean, the investment bankers, maybe like one of the lawyers. And you know, it wasn't leaked far in advance. It was leaked like 20 minutes in advance. So, it was not the worst leak in the world.