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Today’s episode of “Your Business Unleashed” is an absolute treat.
We got to interview Hamed Abbasi – who is the co-founder and CEO of a fintech platform that we use at Achen Henderson as well as many of our GURU customers use called Plooto. Plooto helps to streamline payments and Collections and is an amazing cash flow tool that we probably couldn’t live without.
Below is the transcript
Clayton Achen (01:10):
Why don’t you take us back to the beginning of where your journey started and how you thought of the idea. I hosted Three to Five Club, and we talk about the stages of business, right? Stage one, you got to dream and you’re sharing it with your buddies and your family. Stage two, you’re sort of burning through cash and everything’s horrible. Stage three, maybe you’re breaking even, but you’re not able to pay yourself. Stage four, you’re making a lot of money, but it’s horrible because you’re slave to the business. Stage five, you finally got to start to get some freedom and six and seven, and you’re seven, you’re into Richard Branson territory. So why don’t you start us out at your stage one, where did the idea generate from and what kind of steps did you take to get the business going?
Hamed Abbasi (01:55):
Yeah, so my journey isn’t really the typical FinTech CE0 journey. For me, I think I took a zigzag to get here and for my journey to really make sense you really have to go back to the beginning, all the way to the beginning. I was born in Iran, and I came to Canada when I was 14 years old, my dad came two years before we came in and then sponsored us. So we came to Canada when I was 14 years old, didn’t speak a single word of English. I had to spend three, four years really just learning the language as much as possible and really understand the ways of how everything works. So a lot of the decisions I make, I guess the drive that I have comes from that origin of immigrating to a new country with not much, not any families or friend other than just my immediate parents and really just trying to build something in a new country.
But if you were talking about my entrepreneurial journey, it really starts when I was at Bank of Montreal. I was in personal and commercial banking, and that’s where I was really exposed to the whole world of small businesses, world of payments, how small businesses manage their payables and receivables. And I really like that aspect of working at the bank, but I just did not like working at the bank at all. It was just so bureaucratic and there’s so many layers to everything, and every decision took months and months and months, and everything needed 15 approvals.
Clayton Achen (03:51):
Yeah, that’s a big shift.
Hamed Abbasi (03:52):
Yeah, so during that time, a good friend of mine, Sergey, we had another partner as well, we started building these video games, and this is around 2006, 2005, 2006. And we really loved gaming and we were always gamers. So we started building these games because games went from being a physical product because back in into early 2000, if you wanted to buy a game, you had to actually purchase the disk.
Clayton Achen (04:24):
Yeah. I actually just unpacked my PlayStation 2, in hopes of rekindling some old school gaming with my son, I still have the old Nintendo with the cartridges.
Hamed Abbasi (04:35):
Totally. Yeah, and that’s what I grew up on. I even had the Atari and then the NES and Sega and all of that, but there was a period where it shifted and games went from physical to digital distribution. And when that happened, the cost of building games significantly was reduced. Games went from being something that only Electronic Arts or Take-Two or Activision could build to something that anybody could build and digitally distribute. So we started making these games, these adventure games, and one of them just took off like crazy and made close to $1.2 million in three months.
Clayton Achen (05:20):
Whoa. Are you going to tell us what it was called? Can I go look it up?
Hamed Abbasi (05:24):
Yeah. There’s a website called Big Fish Games, which is what our publisher… Big Fish Games was the biggest publisher during that time.
Clayton Achen (05:33):
Okay.
Hamed Abbasi (05:36):
And the franchise was called Midnight Mysteries. And it’s basically what’s called a hidden object game, which is kind of like, where’s Waldo? You got to find Waldo, but then there’s a story behind it so it’s a bit of an adventure and a bit of hidden object game.
Clayton Achen (05:52):
Cool.
Hamed Abbasi (05:53):
And that game just really took off and made a decent amount of money from just three kids, just testing things out. And when that happened, we realized we had an opportunity there to start our own business. So we actually all quit our jobs. We went from having a side hustle to this is our life, this is what we’re doing. My entrepreneurship journey started because I just really wanted to… I thought banking was the thing that I wanted to do but in reality, what I really was passionate about is building a company, solving a problem, and then combining it with an interest that I had in gaming. And that was the first thing that we built.
Clayton Achen (06:42):
So, sorry, you made 1.2 million in this game, and this is while you had a job, but the new markets had opened up so you obviously figured out coding and how to deal with programming languages and figure out where to go on the internet, which was probably not very many places at the time. You didn’t even know how to look for it. I wouldn’t have even known how to look for a distribution site on the web. How old were you when you did all this?
Hamed Abbasi (07:09):
I was 25 when that happened.
Clayton Achen (07:10):
Wow, right on.
Hamed Abbasi (07:17):
Yeah, okay. Yeah. I am giving you the summary version. The reality is like we pitched the game to 19 publishers and they all said no. Only one of them said yes, and they distributed the game. So it is something that it requires a lot of trial and error. And I think that’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs, I guess miss, is that they always think that I’m going to just start a business and everyone’s going to love this idea whereas the reality is that it takes a lot of work, it’s a lot of nos. And what I was also lucky is that I had a partner who really supplemented the skills that I had. I personally couldn’t code. I did all the business, I did all the negotiations and everything, but he was the engineering genius. Sergey, my co-founder in Plooto as well, basically did all the coding himself, just put all-nighters for two to three days straight and just code everything.
Clayton Achen (08:21):
So you guys are like the Steves, right? You are like the Steves right? Jobs and Wozniak.
Hamed Abbasi (08:31):
Exactly. But yeah, that’s really how it started. And we didn’t know anything about building a business and we couldn’t afford to pay a lot of people because when you think 1.2 million is a lot, but once you have to pay rent and you have to pay for equipment and you have to pay for taxes, there’s not much left, plus three salaries immediately for the founders, there’s not much left. But we were lucky enough to be able to continue to push down that path and we built that company for four years, and then we got acquired in 2014, 2015 is when we got acquired.
Clayton Achen (09:13):
And you were able to step away from the business at that point or did you have it in your contract where you’re going to carry on? Or did you start Plooto right away?
Hamed Abbasi (09:20):
No, we had to spend a year with a parent company. Because when you get acquired, it’s golden handcuffs, I guess is the term that is used. So you have to spend a year with a parent company and the parent…
Clayton Achen (09:35):
… Ensure a good knowledge transfer.
Hamed Abbasi (09:36):
Exactly. And the parent company was very similar, they were a bigger publisher based out of… they had a couple location, Israel, Spain, they were a TSX listed gaming company. And when they acquired us, we really liked their strategy in terms of where they wanted to go, but they really wanted to push into more gambling, gaming and slot machines and things like that. And I didn’t personally have a passion for that. So as my contract was ending, Sergey and I started to think about what is it that we should do next, and where can we transfer all of our knowledge and where can we transfer everything that we’ve learned? And one of the biggest pain points we had when we were running vast studios is that we had all these different developers, contractors around the world. And as the business guy, it was my job to go and pay everyone, have to go to the bank and stand in line and send wire transfers, and then spend my weekends with the bookkeeper trying to figure out how much cash we have left in the bank account.
(10:43)
And that just literally would take a day, day and a half of my week just trying to reconcile everything. And when we talk to other entrepreneurs, they all said that they have the same problem. That yeah, absolutely, this is a big pain for me. And there wasn’t really a solution out there. When I was at the bank we had this treasury management solution for our larger customers, very large enterprise, but it was not built for small businesses. So what we decided to do is to build a solution and that’s how Plooto came out. A lot of time people also ask me, where does the name Plooto comes from?
Clayton Achen (11:23):
I want to know that.
Hamed Abbasi (11:27):
And Plooto really is a play on Pluto, which is God of wealth and God of money. And the word loot in the middle is a reference to our gaming days, because when you get a loot pack in a game, it’s like money or rewards or health pack. So it’s a reference to our old company and as well as where we’re going next.
Clayton Achen (11:49):
Yeah, nice. Here, I forgot to… This is probably a good segue for me to show you. I’m in full support, by the way here. So there we go, there’s my Plooto shirt.
Hamed Abbasi (12:00):
Love it. I love it.
Clayton Achen (12:01):
There we go. So now we’re both aligned. I think I picked this one up in New Orleans.
Hamed Abbasi (12:07):
That’s awesome.
Clayton Achen (12:08):
Earlier this year. Yeah, so I love all the swag.
Hamed Abbasi (12:10):
Appreciate the support.
Clayton Achen (12:12):
Yeah, absolutely. I love the platform for a lot of reasons. We use it at Achen Henderson, and several of our GURU customers use it to manage their payroll. But before we get into the journey with Plooto, why don’t you tell us a little bit in your words about the platform and how it can help small businesses? You’ve already told us the history on where it came from and what it’s born out of, a common complaint about dealing with banking and just how much time you’re spending on it.
Hamed Abbasi (12:47):
Yeah, in order to really understand the problem that we’re trying to solve and why we’re trying to solve this problem, you really have to look at the entrepreneur’s journey. You mentioned Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and all the entrepreneurs we know, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, these are all the superheroes or the Avengers of the startup world. But the reality is that there are literally the superheroes, right? They’re the outliers. They’re not the average business owner, they’re not the average small business owner. In fact, 70% of businesses, small businesses, disappear within 10 years. The rate of failure for small businesses is extremely, extremely high. And when you look at the statistics on why small businesses fail, the number one reason businesses fail is due to poor management of finances and cashflow, it is absolutely the reason that most of them failed.
Clayton Achen (13:57):
Let’s wrap on that for a second.
Hamed Abbasi (13:59):
Sure.
Clayton Achen (13:59):
I preached the same thing with our GURU product. We’re here to help entrepreneurs and business leaders build great companies and we do that by commandeering their bookkeeping and using tools like Plooto to make their lives easier, it is absolutely astounding how many entrepreneurs that we meet who don’t prioritize this stuff. Success is very predictable, the fundamentals are the fundamentals and cash management and good accounting controls are one of the fundamentals. But there seems to be this disconnect with entrepreneurs on mass, I would say. And I’m playing the averages here, obviously. The entrepreneurs who are very successful have a good tight handle on their finances but why do you think that there’s such a disconnect? Is it because there’s a lack of education or it’s hard, or what do you think causes that disconnect? Because you’re absolutely right.
Hamed Abbasi (14:57):
It’s a really great question, and really, I think you hit it on the head when you said that the fundamentals are the fundamentals because the reality is that the rules of success are not unknown. It’s not a secret society that finds these rules and then they say, “Hey, you’re going to be successful, Steve Jobs.” It’s not. The reality is that the rules are very similar, but what you need to do is that… it’s kind of working out. I lost 30 pounds a couple of years ago, and everybody came to me, they’re like, “How did you lose 30? What’s your secret, Hamed?” And I’m like, I ate less and I worked out every day. There’s no secret.
But that discipline is really hard. And when it comes to starting and running a business, most entrepreneurs don’t really understand the fundamentals. What they really start a business is because they fall in love with the problem and the solution. They really want to help other people or their community or customers, doing cash management isn’t why anybody starts a business. You know what I’m saying. And the outcome, even though it’s absolutely crucial to the survival of your business, it’s not why entrepreneurs start businesses. And I totally get it, me going through the experience of having to pay our vendors, having to go to the bank and wait in line to send a wire transfer, because you can’t send an online wire transfer for very small businesses, or you have to manage your books, and none of this data is connected automatically so you have to spend hours and hours as a small business trying to wrangle all this data to see where you are. These are just not fun and this is not why you start.
Clayton Achen (17:11):
When you could be making chairs or pies or serving your community or doing the things that you love, this is a total waste of time.
Hamed Abbasi (17:16):
Absolutely. In the eyes of the entrepreneur.
Clayton Achen (17:20):
Sure.
Hamed Abbasi (17:21):
Absolutely. And also, there’s no satisfaction that comes from-
Clayton Achen (17:27):
Reconciling your bank.
Hamed Abbasi (17:28):
… having clean books.
Clayton Achen (17:28):
Yeah, exactly.
Hamed Abbasi (17:32):
Exactly. It’s just work that needs to get done just so you can do what you really love doing. And when we realized that, I think the big realization for us was like, well, everybody hates doing this work, just balancing your books and reconciling and closing your books and paying everybody and asking people to pay you. Everybody hates these things, and they’re just low value add tasks. It’s like sending emails, you can send a thousand emails a day and achieve nothing. So why don’t we use technology to automate and streamline this? So entrepreneurs and their financial advisors can focus on high value add projects and initiatives, and entrepreneurs can really focus on what they do best, which is to sell their idea, to sell their vision, to serve the customer and try to solve the problem that they’re really obsessed about.
(18:30)
So bringing it back to why we started Plooto is because the number one reason businesses fail is due to poor management of finances and cashflow. And we believe that by using technology, we can streamline and automate that process to give a better chance to entrepreneurs to survive. So really, we want to live in a world where more SMBs exist and more SMBs thrive and grow, and we believe that solving the biggest pain point that they have in their lives daily can lead to a better world like that.
Clayton Achen (19:11):
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think there’s two things, two kind of separate things here. There’s the mechanics of doing the thing, reconciling the bank, paying the bills. And for us, Plooto’s wonderful. Whatever mechanics go into generating the bills, we go into the platform, we click collect, and off it goes. We used it that way initially, now we use it to pay almost everybody. I think we’ve still got one vendor who insists on receiving a check, and they’re so valuable to us that we deal with it. But aside from that, and so that’s the mechanical process.
Clayton Achen (20:03):
Okay, well, there’s the highlight. Podcast, complete. We’re done. I think the second piece is understanding what it is that your business is trying to tell you. And so if you go back to the average entrepreneur, they’re a craftsperson. They do a thing really well, and they decided that because they do that thing really well, they’re going to go into doing business doing that thing. And you go, well, that’s great, but now you’ve got another thing. You’ve got business and business is business, and the fundamentals are the fundamentals and success is very predictable. But just because you’ve got a rockstar pie recipe and you’re good at making pies, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at business. And all these little mechanical tasks get in the way of you building chairs or making pies and they’re annoying.
(21:00)
And so the internet has brought us… ever since your experience with gaming, when we switched from cartridges and DVDs to online gaming or downloading things online anyways, the world is set up now for entrepreneurs to really take that first part out of it and just go all the mechanical tasks, we’re going to make this really easy for you. And I think Plooto really scratches that itch because payments become easy and collections can become easy. And in fact, when we started out with Plooto at Achen Henderson, we rethought our revenue model, and it was in the spirit of recurring revenue. And that’s when we first jumped on Plooto is we went, okay, I want to set it and forget its solution where I’m not dealing with billing and revenue collections. I don’t want AR anymore. We’re going on PAD and you’re paying us monthly. And that’s just how it’s got to be because that’s a thing, that’s a mechanical thing that’s getting in the way of us succeeding in being the craftspeople, right?
Hamed Abbasi (22:00):
Totally.
Clayton Achen (22:01):
So I think that there’s two really different things. And the first thing, you’re really doing great by solving those mechanical things. And then it’s neat to see folks like you jump on podcasts and talk about your journey, an entrepreneur’s journey to solve the second piece, which is understanding why it’s so important because reading financial statements is not easy, but when you boil it down to it, most entrepreneurs in their business need to know two or three numbers to be successful and just track those two or three numbers and all the rest can be handled by somebody else.
(22:35)
But when you’re starting out, you wear all the hats, you’re the finance, you’re the marketing. And you go, well, wait a minute, it’s 25 bucks a month. And a lot of people do that debate. I think when you had your series A, you inserted a monthly fee, I think that was with your series A. And we even went, whoa, what’s this? 25 bucks a month? But you step back and think about it and it’s like, okay, if I save 10 minutes standing in line in a bank per month, that’s worth it for me.
Hamed Abbasi (23:05):
For sure. I went to Chipotle the other day for lunch. It costs $19 for a bowl of salad and a little bit of chicken whereas Plooto is saving you probably… on average they say it takes around 15 to 20 minutes to process a single invoice. So four invoices, that’s an hour. If you are processing more than four invoices, I’m sorry, six invoices, right? You are now making money with Plooto at $25, right?
Clayton Achen (23:51):
Absolutely.
Hamed Abbasi (23:52):
So for you, it’s a no-brainer, what is your time worth? Minimum wage in Ontario right now it’s like $15, if you’re spending an hour and a half on doing this type of work, then Plooto is a no-brainer for you. But I think the one thing that you mentioned that I thought it was very, very important is that… what entrepreneurs need to realize is that you can’t do everything yourself.
Clayton Achen (24:24):
Absolutely.
Hamed Abbasi (24:25):
We get into this idea of, hey, I’m the CEO, I’m the co-founder. I need to do everything. I am responsible for everything but the reality is, it’s not. You’re not responsible for everything. You are just an employee of this organization. You might be the CEO or the founder, but at the same time, it’s a team sport and you need to have really, really good people around you to be able to take some of these responsibilities away from you so you can focus on what you do best, which is your craft. This is why if you’re an actor, you have an agent, you have a PR person, you have a stylist.
(25:05)
Think about artists. Artists are surrounded with people who take care of them. It’s no different than being a shoemaker or making donuts or pizza. You are an artist and artists need to be surrounded by people who have different skill sets, whether it is somebody who understands how to reconcile their accounts and give them the reports that they need, or if it’s somebody to manage the customer complaints and emails and everything, you need to surround yourself and Plooto is just another one of those tools that can help you succeed.
Clayton Achen (25:45):
Yeah. I love it. A couple things that you’d mentioned, I think you started off saying that you’d spend a day and a half dealing with banking. And so when we talk about time savings, I want to drill into that a little bit, but also this idea of… just share a little story about our journey. Originally, it was just me and George. We were just going to be me and George, and we had our target salary and we could do accounting, and that would be great and I’m reasonably good at taxes. And eventually it went, oh man, my daughter’s born here. 2017, the federal government sort of ripped the carpet from us on a lot of the tax planning we’d been doing, and I can’t take this anymore, I need some help. And so we started to hire people, but what I realized was I didn’t hire people fast enough.
(26:33)
If you’ve got a good business and you’re committed to the model and you surround yourself with the right people to succeed, you will succeed as long as you’re doing the right things, the fundamentals. And a mentor of mine was sitting in our office a couple years back and they said, “Clayton, you’ve got the tech stack dialed. You’ve got the processes dialed, you’ve got the revenue model dialed. If I was the office managing partner of your firm, I’d hire 10 more people today.” And I’m going, whoa, that’s scary. Because 10 people at, I don’t know, $60,000 a year on average, maybe. So that’s 600K, I don’t even make 600K, where’s that money going to come from? And we have this sort of idea that if I go out and spend money on a salary, I’m going to lose that money right out of the gate.
(27:20)
Or if I go and spend 25 bucks on Plooto, I’m going to lose that money. And it’s like, no, that’s not how this works. And I can say that now because we’re 15 people and growing, we’re hiring for positions all over the place right now, and I just want to hire more people because every person that I hire, the bigger our business gets, and the easier things get because new ideas come to the table. And that sort of brings me back to another thing that you’d said is, listen, I handled the Steves, I handled the business end and my partner was the coder. And that’s another mistake that we need to get away from is we’re not… Hamed is not going out and learning how to code, okay? Because I’m not good at that, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and develop that skill. I’m going to hire to supplement what I’m missing. So really key, interesting points, it just sort of churned up some memories for me, so thank you.
Hamed Abbasi (28:15):
No, for sure. And I think that was one of the crucial learnings for me, because as an entrepreneur, we’re also… First of all, before you become an entrepreneur, something has to be wrong with you already to want to go down this path of being an entrepreneur. Like you have to be a control freak.
Clayton Achen (28:40):
You got to want to not take vacations for over a year.
Hamed Abbasi (28:42):
Exactly. You can’t take no for an answer, you’re stubborn. You think differently than most people that you meet in your journey. So those are great things because it allows you to take an idea and actually develop it. Whereas a lot of people who may not be entrepreneurs and entrepreneur doesn’t mean you start a business, you can be an entrepreneur within a larger organization.
Clayton Achen (29:10):
Absolutely.
Hamed Abbasi (29:10):
It’s just the type of goal-getting attitude that I described as the entrepreneur. So it requires you to take this idea and make it happen. And for me, the biggest learning that I had was I don’t need to answer every email, be in every meeting, be in every department, speak to everybody. And I think that’s something that I struggle still to this day. We’re at 90 people now, and I still struggle because I want to know what’s happening.
(29:43)
I want to know are we providing our customers the high value that we’ve promised them? Are we delivering on our promise every single day? And for me, the big change is what you are talking about, which is what are you trying to do? Are you trying to keep this as a hobby for you and make this a lifestyle business? Or are you trying to build something bigger and deliver this value to more and more customers? And once I started to think like that, then I started to think about my expenses as investments.
Clayton Achen (30:17):
Absolutely.
Hamed Abbasi (30:21):
And rate of return on my investments and that allowed me to do what you are talking about, which is to go out there and spend this money and hire these 10 people because I’m not thinking about the cost. Well, obviously I am thinking about the cost, but I’m also thinking about what is the rate of return on this investment? And then you understand that your job as a CEO, as a founder, as an entrepreneur is to be a really good steward of capital and be a good capital allocator, which is a different way of thinking about your role but I guess that’s the journey that you need to take in order to scale your business.
Clayton Achen (30:58):
Okay, we got seven and a half minutes left and I would like you to give us your elevator pitch on Plooto, and then I want to talk about some other initiatives that I noticed that you’re into just from checking out your online presence. So elevator pitch on Plooto, go.
Hamed Abbasi (31:15):
So Plooto, we are a payment automation platform for small to medium size businesses. We help them eliminate the inefficiencies and gaps that exist in their accounts payable and accounts receivable processes. And we help them automate and streamline that entire process so they can get access to their cash faster and also keep their suppliers happy by paying them on time. And at the same time, have all of that data reconcile automatically so you don’t have to do any manual paperwork or any manual handling of any of your records because it’s all automated.
Clayton Achen (31:55):
When you talk about it’s all automated, what platforms do you integrate with currently?
Hamed Abbasi (32:00):
So we are currently fully integrated to the QuickBook STACK. So QuickBooks Online, Desktop Enterprise, as well as Xero with a new funding that we just announced. One of the key initiatives that we are embarking on is to integrate with larger accounting platforms such as Sage and Intact and NetSuite so those are the ones that we’re working on as well.
Clayton Achen (32:27):
Awesome. In terms of initiatives, I noticed you post a little bit about the FinTechs Canada initiative, is that something you want to chat about? And then I wouldn’t mind getting your thought on crypto. As our director of marketing put it last week, or maybe it was earlier this week, he’s like, “I wish I’d have bought crypto and then I’m glad I didn’t, and then I wish I’d have bought crypto and I’m glad I didn’t.” And where’s this whole thing going? So I guess FinTech in Canada and then crypto, if you don’t mind.
Hamed Abbasi (33:01):
Yeah, of course. I actually have a really funny story on crypto, so I’ll share that with you. So when it comes to FinTech Canada, we are at a really, really crucial time in the history of FinTech. All the payment technologies that exist in North America were really built in the ’70s and they haven’t been updated that many times since they were implemented. So a lot of issues you see today, we get a lot of customers who come to us and they’re like, “Why is my payment not faster? Why can’t I do instant payments?” That’s because none of the banks are doing instant payments. None of the banks are connected to one another. These are technologies from ’70s trying to just hold together by duct tape.
Clayton Achen (33:54):
Is that out of fear? Is that out of fear that the security’s not good enough? Or is that just banks are slow to move?
Hamed Abbasi (34:02):
No, you’re talking about this 800 pound gorilla, right? It’s so tough to move anything and it’s just slow. And there’s government and there’s regulation, and there’s just so many different stakeholders that it’s impossible to move any faster. So what we believe with FinTech Canada is that there’s an opportunity to have a voice outside of the top Xs, and that voice is really the voice of the up and coming FinTech leaders in the organization. We need to get together in the industry. We have to have a single voice together and really communicate that message to the government in terms of what is important to us. So that way, that message is balanced and it’s not just the banks that are advocating to the government on what is important. So that’s why I really feel we have a huge opportunity with what’s happening in Canada and also in the US with payment innovation that’s happening and all the revitalization that’s happening, it gives us an opportunity to speak as one and make sure that our voices are heard.
Clayton Achen (35:17):
Okay. Right on. And tell us your crypto story.
Hamed Abbasi (35:24):
So Plooto actually started in 2015 as a Bitcoin blockchain company.
Clayton Achen (35:27):
Really? I did not know that.
Hamed Abbasi (35:35):
A lot of people don’t know that. Yeah, a lot of people didn’t know. So for the first six to nine months, we were a fully crypto company. Our idea was to have a single wallet where you can have all of your cryptocurrency, which was ahead of its time back in the day. But what we really quickly realized is that our customers who were small businesses didn’t care about crypto or blockchain at all. But what the feedback we got in the first six months was hey, I know the features you’ve built, but can you throw out this Bitcoin thing and just make it work with my bank? So when we heard that from our customers, we pivoted in 2016. So Plooto as you see today, is that first pivot that we made from 2015 to 2016. However, I did buy a couple of Bitcoin at $250 Canadian, which I feel like it’s my best investment I’ve ever made. So some good came out of it. We didn’t go on with that strategy, but at least we did buy a couple of Bitcoins.
Clayton Achen (36:40):
Yeah. Where’s it going? Is it on your radar? Are we going to see with the big collapse of the FTX, is this going to still stay front of mind? Are we in a bit of a renaissance of fiat cash here?
Hamed Abbasi (36:55):
So I tend to agree with Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, that the governments, especially in developed countries, I don’t think that the governments are going to have a desire to let these cryptocurrencies become the dominant method of transacting. I think that is something that we’re going to see more and more and more regulation in this area, and the governments are going to clamp down, especially with what’s happening with FTX because a lot of people have lost money. So I think crypto is not going to be so much a method of transacting. It’s going to be an asset. It’s an asset class. It’s an asset class that you can trade. But really what I find interesting is the concept of international instant payments. To me, that is the genie out of the lamp, I guess. It’s something we can’t put back into the lamp. And I think to me, the future of whatever it is it’s going to turn into, whether it’s blockchain or crypto, I think the technology is really interesting. The technology that will allow us to do international instant transfers across the globe is what I’m predicting is going to turn into a Bitcoin or all the Dogecoin and all of those. To me, they’re just an asset class and you can speculate on it, nothing more than that.
Clayton Achen (38:49):
Interesting. Super great to have caught up with you. It’s Hamed Abbasi, co-founder and CEO of Plooto platform that we use for payments and collections, and you should check it out as well as an entrepreneur, small business owner. Thank you so much, Hamed.
Hamed Abbasi (39:05):
Thank you for having me.
Show notes:
Plooto’s website: Automated Accounts Payable and Receivable Software | Plooto Inc.
