Garrett Cassidy, co-founder and CEO of Trezeo, joins the show to talk about making financial services accessible to independent workers, the snowball effect of impacting people's lives, mental health perspectives in the startup community....and the impact of scuba diving on his ability to communicate!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
This week we talk to Garrett Cassidy from Trezeo, a fintech on a mission to help independent workers with their financial lives by providing them with a comprehensive safety net delivered 100% digitally. As Garrett said recently on a Future of Work interview series for Aperture, “Trezeo is not a social enterprise, it is a for-profit investor-backed enterprise. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money from doing the right thing, and that’s where technology changes things fundamentally.” Pete Townsend met Garrett back in 2014 when he came into Pete's office talking excitedly about startups and pre-accelerators, and Pete looks back at that meeting as one of the reasons that he's doing what he does. See below for some of the soundbite highlights, and the link here for the Techstars video series on mental health in the startup community and separately for Garrett's pitch at the Barclay's Accelerator powered by Techstars.
“Just because you work a different way, why should you have such radically different access to financial services? It’s a simple idea, but a really gnarly set of problems to solve.”
“We actually started by looking at better banking and financial services for micro-businesses, but with our early customer research and some independent research at the time, we dug into the gig economy, the sharing economy and the self-employed, and we realized there was a much bigger and more important problem to solve.”
“When we dug into the problem of broken bank accounts for the people we were trying to solve it for, we realized that bank accounts weren’t as broken for them because they didn’t really care - most self-employed and independent workers don’t have a separate bank account for their business.”
“Keeping a broad mindset of trying to validate the problem actually brought us to “we’re actually looking at the wrong thing here.’"
“Startups are tough, but if they weren’t, the problems wouldn't be there, someone would have solved them already”
“One of our customers came to us and said “You know what, I just got my first mainstream credit and I’ve never been able to get it before. Although that’s just one person, it creates the drive to do this again and again and again.”
“The typical qualities of startup founders - curiosity and persistence are both a double-edged sword of becoming unfocused and pigheaded.”
“What we’ve become better on is articulating our purpose and vision - what are we trying to do, what’s our guiding light and what will help towards that, and push hard towards it."To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.
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