Zach Perret – The Future of Financial Services – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.13]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investforfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:06)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:29)
My guest this week is Zach Perret, the founder and CEO of Plaid. Plaid helps companies build fintech solutions by creating APIs that allow people to connect their financial data to apps and services.
In this conversation, we dive into Zach's philosophy on building products, how the financial system works today, how the financial system needs to be updated, and the trends Zach is seeing from the next wave of fintech companies launching on Plaid. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Zach Perret. So, Zach, you said something that piqued my interest, which is this notion you got from your parents of great challenges. Can you describe what that idea is and why it's relevant for your life?

**Zach Perret** (2:09)
My parents are really wonderful and both musicians, so they raised me in a little bit of a strange way. It was very much a kind of treat the child as a mini adult. They gave me adult books quite early. One of the things that my dad always framed was this concept of great challenges. What are the great challenges out there that you're going to go tackle or go work on?
As a kid, that makes you a really mission-driven kid and also really weird, by the way, because you talk about all of these things that none of your friends care about. But a few of the ones that really intrigued me as a kid were interplanetary exploration, for example. For this irrational amount of time, I wanted to be an astronaut, which was fantastically fun, but to the point that I was 22, 23, still thinking about how can I become an astronaut.
Aging was one that really captured my attention, particularly in college. I did a lot of work in the natural sciences, focusing, thinking about that, learning.
Economic empowerment and financial freedom, that's the foundation to Plaid. And as we ended up founding Plaid, it was one of the things that really drew me towards the company and towards the opportunity, this concept that we could help consumers live better financial lives and frankly be happier. If you look at many of the surveys, the number one or the number two most stressful thing in a consumer's life day to day is money. And the ability to help people have greater financial freedom was fantastically interesting. So this concept of great challenges is this little oddity that my father instilled and has been very helpful in how I think about the world.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:33)
How did he do that literally?
What was the routine that installed that idea into your brain as a kid? What did he do as a parent? It seems like something good to do for once, kids.

**Zach Perret** (3:43)
My dad loved to just ask questions and ask questions and try to go towards the base state or get back to first principles is what people talk about now. But for him, it was just like always asking the next question, always asking why, always asking what's the bigger picture and how do we zoom out.