ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
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I just look for various ways to join the company, actually. And the first job I applied for, I actually didn't get. And then I set my eyes on joining the enzyme research division, as you also picked up on. So So when I eventually got in, I actually never applied for a job because I did my thesis, and then they offered me a job. So when you did apply, you got rejected, and then you ended up working for the company without applying. Yeah. But that was before I joined university, actually. You know, I had I have a degree also as a laboratory technician before I went to university, and it was there that I applied for a job that I didn't get. I'm thinking in hindsight, they probably thought I would skip to university and not keep the job as a laboratory technician, which was probably true, right? So I started out there working with back then Novozymes had a collaboration with Procter and Gamble. So we were making enzymes for laundry detergents, and it was super exciting. I always had my mind set on that I wanted to do product related research and never had a strong interest in being an academic, researcher. For me, it was exciting to make a product. Wow. Well, you certainly ended up doing that. To my mind, enzymes are completely different than diabetes research and and what ultimately GLP ones. Is that common to switch between those two fields? Or I actually wasn't the only one. It's not common, of course. You know, I graduated from the Technical University of of Denmark. So we're a small country, but still, you know, Denmark's Caltech or MIT, right? I'm trained in in biotechnology. And that means, you know, I could go several ways, but I was in a small group when I started in Novozymes that where many of us actually came from the technical university, but I was at that time the head of the group. He was actually also a medical doctor. So when Novo at the time, or Novo Nordisk, wanted to look more into finding new
Where exactly interchange would get cut? When I see a lot of the Wall Street analyst reports on Visa, it feels like they just talk about interchange getting cut at the knees indiscriminately, and all interchange is the same to them. When I think in reality, consumer credit interchange versus business debit interchange versus charge cards are all totally different risk pools for Visa. And the one that seems most likely to get cut, I'm not making a statement of yes likely or no likely, but ranks highest on my list is probably Durban exempt interchange. And so to to back up, this is really relevant for the Fintech narrative. This is a rule that allows some debit cards to make 2% interchange on all debit card spend instead of what is the capped regulated rate of just 10 to 20 basis points, so 10 x higher revenue. And the reason the exemption exists is to say there are a lot of small banks out there, oftentimes regional or local community banks, that really Debit interchange was their main source of revenue or can be a main source of revenue. We want you to keep banking that your populations very well. So we don't wanna take this business away from you. So we'll protect you all. You all are Durbin exempt. Now what's been happening This is for banks under a threshold of assets. Right? That's right. It's under 10,000,000,000 of assets. You are considered a Durbin exempt bank. The list of all the banks who qualify for this is public. And just so listeners know, there was a thing called the Durbin Act that passed that for the large banks capped the debit card interchange rates. So that's that 10 to 20 basis points, Gaurav, that you're talking about. Exactly right. How this has been getting used in Fintech world is a lot of Fintech companies partner with these banks and say, you're a small bank. You get 2% of interchange. Let us be an extension or a rapper of you, build the consumer experience, and we will make the 2% interchange ourselves or the bulk of it and share a little bit of it.
Was gonna be there for life. In fact, 2016, we bought a house a half mile from the Motley Fool's headquarters, and my wife and I were, like, this is it. This is great. And I was so stoked. They took good care of me. I was happy. All my friends were there. And then in 2015, a guy named Craig Shapiro, who runs a collaborative fund, reached out and he said, hey. I like your writing. Why don't you come work for the collaborative fund and keep doing exactly what you're doing? Just do it here. And my response was, hey. Thank you. I'm flattered, but I'm really happy at the full. And my wife and I, we had our first kid, a newborn. We just bought a house like I said. I was not in the mood to upend my career. That was already so good and so comfortable. So I said, thanks, but no thanks. And he kept pestering away. Not pestering. He was he was very polite about it, but Craig and I kept meeting for the next year, and he finally convinced me that it was it was gonna be the right move. It was still very scary to leave something that I was so comfortable at and that I'd really ingrained my identity at. I joined CloudFront in 2016. The reason it works so well is that Craig and I have total mutual trust in each other, and our arrangement is more or less, you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we'll both go do our best work. And that's why it works. So when I joined Collaborative Fund, the agreement with Craig is, like, I'm gonna write what I want, when I want, in the style that I want, and, like, period. And that period can never be erased. It's worth to 7 years later, that's what it's been. I really feel like it's just my personal template to to draw on, and it's a lot of fun. It's so funny sitting here at, like, the end of 2023, you know, people listening who maybe haven't focused on your story before. They might be, like, yeah. Okay. Like, cool. That's maybe somewhat surprising that this happened. Like, oh, a venture capital fund would bring somebody on to just, like, create content not even related to the firm. In 2016, that was, like, a literal insane idea. It was crazy. And then for some more context, when I joined collaborative fund, I think AUM was a little over a $100,000,000, which is not very big, and I was employee number, like, 4.
Sponsor here on acq 2, Quarter. Their new product, Quarter Pro, launched about a year ago and is already adopted by several Fortune 500 companies and some of the world's largest hedge funds and equity research departments. Yeah. This research platform is transforming the way qualitative public market research is conducted. Here's how QuarterPro works. You can get every piece of first party information from public companies all in one single place. That's live earnings calls with real time transcripts, company filings, slide decks, and more. Quarter Pro has built a world class user interface for this. Yep. Let's say you're an investor or a podcaster, and you've got the use case where you need to look up a company such as Novo Nordisk, Hermes, or Visa. You can open their platform and search guidance or market outlook. QuarterPro then immediately identifies all instances where a company has historically mentioned and discussed these topics in all of their IR related communications. Or here's another pretty crazy thing they've done that's difficult to get anywhere else. You can actually search through literally every individual slide in Quarters database covering 9,000 public companies and millions of slides for any keyword mentioned based on Quartar's AI capabilities. This truly makes it easier than ever to conduct qualitative analysis of entire industry value chains and specific companies. So whether you're an equity research analyst, an asset manager, or an investor relations professional, This platform will help you increase your productivity through their live call, transcript components, AI powered summaries, and a feature allowing you to visualize the entire timeline and changes of specific slides throughout quarters. Quarter also offers their database as an API solution. This enables other companies, such as trading and research platforms, as well as AI and LLM companies to build custom solutions and integrate this database into their offerings or add functionality on top of the data. Yep. To find out why leading companies globally are choosing quarter pro in their day to day work
Sponsor here on acq 2, Quarter. Their new product, Quarter Pro, launched about a year ago and is already adopted by several Fortune 5 100 companies and some of the world's largest hedge funds and equity research departments. Yeah. This research platform is transforming the way qualitative public market research is conducted. Here's how QuarterPro works. You can get every piece of first party information from public companies all in one single place. That's live earnings calls with real time transcripts, company filings, slide decks, and more. Quarter Pro has built a world class user interface for this. Yep. Let's say you're an investor or a podcaster, and you've got the use case where you need to look up a company such as Novo Nordisk, Hermes, or Visa. You can open their platform and search guidance or market outlook. QuarterPro then immediately identifies all instances where a company has historically mentioned and discussed these topics in all of their IR related communications. Or here's another pretty crazy thing they've done that's difficult to get anywhere else. You can actually search through literally every individual slide in quarter's database covering 9,000 public companies and millions of slides for any keyword mentioned based on quarter's AI capabilities. This truly makes it easier than ever to conduct qualitative analysis of entire industry value chains and specific companies. So whether you're an equity research analyst, an asset manager, or an investor relations professional, this platform will help you increase your productivity through their live call, transcript components, AI powered summaries, and a feature allowing you to visualize the entire timeline and changes of specific slides throughout quarters. Quarter also offers their database as an API solution. This enables other companies, such as trading and research platforms, as well as AI and LLM companies to build custom solutions and integrate this database into their offerings or add functionality on top of the data. Yep. To find out why leading companies globally are choosing Quarter Pro in their day to day work
