The Flychain Flywheel: Ethan Schwarzbach with Jenny Fielding
Ethan Schwarzbach, co-founder of Flychain chats with Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 103: The Flychain Flywheel.
In episode 103 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Ethan Schwarzbach, co-founder of Flychain, a startup building the financial operating system for small to medium-sized healthcare providers. Ethan shares his journey from investment banking to fintech at Orchard, where insights from Square's merchant processing data inspired Flychain's initial product. He discusses how underwriting healthcare businesses revealed a critical gap in financial infrastructure, leading Flychain to build a specialized platform that replaces QuickBooks and delivers AI-powered financial insights for practices.
In this episode, you will hear:
Bridging cashflow gaps of healthcare providers.
Addressing financial infrastructure crisis in healthcare practices.
Leveraging accurate EMR data for AI-driven decision-making.
Partnering with healthcare networks to reach underserved practices.
Positioning for value-based care and consolidation landscape shifts.
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00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Jenny: Welcome, everyone, to Venture Everywhere, where we tap into the wisdom of our portfolio founders and folks from our community.
00:00:42 Jenny: Today I’m very excited that Ethan Schwarzbach, the co-founder of Flychain, is joining us. Flychain is a startup building the financial operating system for small to medium size healthcare providers.
00:00:53 Jenny: But actually the way you describe it on LinkedIn or in other material, the financial control tower for your healthcare practice. So can you tell us a little bit more about that Ethan?
00:01:05 Ethan: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Flychain’s been around for almost three years now and building, as Jenny mentioned, the financial operating system, financial control tower for small to medium sized businesses in healthcare.
00:01:16 Ethan: When we say that we think about the vendor stack in healthcare and we imagine this fictitious line where you have a line where above that line are your EMRs, practice management systems, revenue cycle management, billing, a lot of other things that go into seeing patients getting paid by insurance.
00:01:31 Ethan: Flychain sits below that line and then every healthcare business will have a payroll system and then accounting and it’s usually QuickBooks. And so what we’re going in as the entry point is to replace QuickBooks.
00:01:41 Ethan: From there, we do that to get all the data accurate, standardized. We’ll integrate to the EMRs, integrate to all the systems, which oftentimes like a QuickBooks can’t handle. It gives us a really much more granular picture of the financials of a healthcare business by piecing together all of the granular revenue to the granular expenses. And then that gives us the ability to then do a lot more with that data.
00:02:03 Ethan: We lend to a whole host of different services, but you can think about us as the financial team/CFO/accounting firm.
00:02:11 Jenny: That’s great. And I’d love to go back a little bit the way that we heard about you with some of our mutual friend Angela, who I guess you worked with at Orchard. Tell us a little bit about your background in and around the FinTech space that potentially informs where you ended up taking Flychain.
00:02:27 Ethan: Started off out of college working on a trading floor at an investment bank, especially when I graduated, it was you either did banking, consulting, law school or med school. Did that for a couple of years. I like to say I learned a fair amount about finance, but I really hated that job.
00:02:41 Ethan: I left and joined Orchard, which sat between all these non-bank lenders, consumer commercial, and the institutional investors that were funding them. So worked for Angela there.
00:02:49 Ethan: That experience, it was new to me, this whole non-bank lending universe, fintech universe. Some of the kernels of what I saw there actually informed the initial build of Flychain. Our first product was what we call advanced payment on insurance claims.
00:03:02 Ethan: When we were at Orchard, we had a really cool front row seat to Square being launched and looking at merchant processing credit card data, especially from the eyes of an institutional credit investor. It’s pretty awesome in my opinion.
00:03:15 Ethan: We took that as a first principle within healthcare, who has an equivalent to that merchant processing data. We started partnering up with billers. It was really coming from that Orchard experience and then the other FinTech background that I have. All related though just small to medium size business, lending, banking, payments, accounting.
00:03:33 Ethan: But that was the entry point for Flychain was we had this vision all along to build this financial control tower, this platform, but use that advanced payment on claims as a bit of a wedge. And I know it’s counterintuitive for a fintech company to start with lending to then build the platform.
00:03:48 Ethan: But for us, my co-founder and I, Jaime, we asked ourselves, what better way to learn what other fintech tooling we need than to solve a cashflow issue in the form of lending, but also underwrite.
00:03:58 Ethan: And by underwriting these businesses, seeing every dollar in and out, understanding how they operate, it really informed the entire rest of our build, which I’m sure we’ll get into. But that’s a combination of a lot of background experience that led us to build something new in healthcare.
00:04:14 Jenny: When I first met you, that was the primary focus. And I love that because there are all these businesses that you don’t necessarily think about what their friction point is in delivering service. And obviously if the healthcare providers have to wait to be paid, then that’s going to tie up their whole system. So that was an aha moment for me where I was like, wow, this makes a ton of sense. It’s a no brainer.
00:04:33 Jenny: So can you talk a little bit about how you started there, but then you saw this larger opportunity and some of the operating system, about the accounting and QuickBooks part?
00:04:43 Ethan: Happy to. So rewinding the clock when we first met, that was really Flychain. It was advanced payment on insurance claims. And if you looked at our fundraising deck down the slides, it said financial operating system.
00:04:54 Ethan: We had a few things like FinTech tooling that we wanted to build, didn’t know the order and if everything was even going to make it to the roadmap by doing all of these underwrites.
00:05:04 Ethan: I should also mention we started off in home healthcare and behavioral health. And they have that very unique cashflow paradigm where they have to pay their staff every week or two, all of their revenues tied up in insurance. Banks can’t lend to them because they don’t have any assets on their balance sheet. They just run for the hills.
00:05:19 Ethan: And the only folks that will lend are those sketchy merchant cash advance lenders. And so taking a first principle of, let’s just solve this cashflow issue for these home health and behavioral health businesses. It’s not because they’re bad businesses, they have good margins. It’s just wonky cashflow issues. There’s a lot of seasonality that can arise.
00:05:36 Ethan: Change Healthcare happened last year. Tricare has been a nightmare. So that was that entry point. We actually in the first year, probably underwrote about 250 businesses. We would always pull bank data and accounting data. And that was that light bulb moment that led the horse that is Flychain to water.
00:05:53 Ethan: What I mean by that is 90% of the time we pulled the accounting data, it made zero sense to us. It was either non-existent in some cases, but more often than not really lagging behind or just miscategorized. Then we took a closer look. We saw everyone’s using QuickBooks. We think QuickBooks is okay for a pizza shop or a nail salon, not a multimillion dollar, multi-location healthcare entity who have insurance claims. QuickBooks isn’t inherently HIPAA compliant.
00:06:20 Ethan: We saw the product itself not living up to what the needs of a healthcare business needs. It was actually the process too. We were like, all right, you’re fitting a square peg in a round hole, but also who’s actually doing the books to get this data accurate? Cause we know it’s not accurate so where does that problem set?
00:06:35 Ethan: It was either they were doing the books internally, then it was owners, operators that are in healthcare, very much trained to deliver care and even run a business, not the financial side. So it was a lot of garbage in, garbage out. Or they use a third party bookkeeper that works often with pizza shops, nail salons. I can’t tell you how many times it’s just the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin.
00:06:55 Ethan: We said, Hey, we’re going to solve the whole problem there to get the data accurate. Now that informs all of the other things that we’ve built, but that was the first principle of let’s get the data accurate, build a replacement to QuickBooks. Bring the bookkeepers. We bring them to guarantee quality control, take it off of our customers’ plate.
00:07:12 Ethan: Now we have this very, very accurate financial data set, the source of truth, your system of record. It’s now informing and powers all of the other tooling that we’ve built on the analytics, AI CFO side of the fence.
00:07:24 Ethan: It’s been a journey for sure, but I don’t feel like we’re making up problems or making up products to solve those problems. Our customers are our best product managers in a lot of ways.
00:07:34 Jenny: It’s actually funny. My grandfather, one of them, was an accountant and he used to help everyone with their taxes. I feel like everyone has this family member who is very well-meaning, but probably not right for a healthcare system to have grandpa doing the accounting.
00:07:48 Jenny: As you mentioned, there’s so many variables and you have to have a very complicated matrix to figure out where the cash is coming in. Again, you can’t miss payroll and you can’t shop for a couple of weeks. It really is critical, especially in things like health. That’s an interesting insight.
00:08:01 Jenny: Walk us through a little bit of how you see the market. You started with one demographic, it seems like you might be going a little bit broader. So tell us the big picture of where you see Flychain going.
00:08:12 Ethan: Big picture for us is if you’re a healthcare business under $50 million in annual revenue, you should be using Flychain. Started off in home health and behavioral health and not going anywhere. That is a great market. There’s a lot of tailwinds and they desperately need the help.
00:08:26 Ethan: But in now launching the platform, having that live for 18 months or so, we’ve actually been able to expand across different healthcare verticals. How we see the market going back to that little line in the sand, as I mentioned before, we have a luxury at Flychain because we’re below that line.
00:08:42 Ethan: We’re not having to deal with the intricacies that maybe an EMR or a revenue cycle management provider will have where we’re in our view and how we see the market is usually those that are focused on a specialty, especially in our universe are the ones that I think win and the ones that do really well. And we have a front row seat who’s good and who’s not. Cause we see all their data and we know if they’re good billers, et cetera.
00:09:02 Ethan: I guess the long and short of it is we’ve seen also a lot of VC money flow into that side of the fence, like AI scribes, point solutions, credentialing. Obviously AI RCM has been huge. A lot of new EMRs, business in a box type things. Because we sit below that line, going from ADA therapy to dentistry, it’s actually pretty much the same from our end.
00:09:23 Ethan: The same value proposition. We’re onboarding them, we’re integrating. That’s the piece that will be different per specialty. But we’re not having to figure out how to bill all of these different payers, each state, each code, each payer. That’s how we see the market and our horizontal expansion across all these different healthcare verticals.
00:09:41 Ethan: We’re not handcuffed by the complexities that we see our partners, which we partner very often with EMRs, RCMs, have to deal with. Staying in our lane, really just being that financial piece of the puzzle here. That’s how we see the landscape today.
00:09:54 Jenny: It’s interesting because I was a panelist yesterday. It was AI themed. And the question was really around defensibility. I was saying, this isn’t just AI specific. I think it’s any SaaS business. If you can be hyper-verticalized and then you can go really deep, really get a lot of customer loyalty, it becomes very sticky. And then that creates its own flywheel of a community.
00:10:17 Jenny: So from niche to network is how I think about it. So obviously you can say that that distribution is your mote around AI, but it’s any SaaS business really. How are you guys thinking about other players coming in? I also love to just hear about your positioning on AI as well.
00:10:34 Ethan: I’ll first start with a lot of the AI maybe point solutions that we’ve seen. I refer to like AI scribe note taking and we’ve seen a lot of growth in that. We’ve seen other EMRs partner with those entities and then kick them out after a year or whatever, and then just build their own. Done this.
00:10:51 Ethan: From a defensibility standpoint what makes our company different is fundamentally being that source of truth and system of record. So our stickiness is pretty darn high relative to a lot of other either SaaS platforms or certainly these AI solutions.
00:11:04 Ethan: So by building that system of record, we’ve really insulated ourselves. People cancel their accounting system, bring it all over to us and then become a very, very important piece of their overall puzzle.
00:11:15 Jenny: The specificity of what you’re solving again with the HIPAA compliance with the real focus just on this vertical, a generalist can’t really provide.
00:11:24 Ethan: There’s obviously a lot we could talk about here that sets us apart and makes it different, but to really just simplify it within healthcare, all of the revenue, if you want to get granular, is actually captured within those EMRs and billing systems.
00:11:37 Ethan: For us, we have to integrate and then it’s a matter of really looking at expenses granularly and mapping them to the granular revenue so profitability by employee, by CPT code, by service line. That can only be done by liberating that data from the EMR. That’s one of the big challenges that a lot of folks that are trying to do this run into.
00:11:57 Ethan: Fortunately for us, we’ve solved the data interoperability issue for ourselves. It brings it to this piece of the puzzle. And why I say all of that is you ask, where’s AI in our business? Everyone has different opinions on this. I certainly have some strong ones.
00:12:11 Ethan: But for us, the whole obsession at Flychain was getting the data accurate. That’s why we built the platform, why we bring the bookkeepers. We silo all of the specialties into their own unique data set, standardized chart of accounts.
00:12:24 Ethan: That’s the first stage when we onboard a customer. The second is what we call peeling the onion. So that’s when we’re going into those EMRs and now doing more analytics. Now we’re fundamentally a system of record and a granular system of record at that.
00:12:36 Ethan: But the last piece of our puzzle and we’ve actually launched it internally, it’ll go live in Q1 as our AI CFO. What we mean by that is the last phase to really unlock that and have that be powerful so it’s not system of record, it’s system of action, is actually then contextualizing that granular data. It’s really around benchmarking.
00:12:55 Ethan: With each customer, we get some market data, but we’re able to benchmark and show here’s your net profit. Here’s your gross profit. Here’s what your wages for your BCBAs are versus the market. Here’s your contracted rate.
00:13:07 Ethan: Now that we have this perfectly accurate granular data set that is contextualized, when we now ask our AI CFO questions around, can I hire another clinician? It’ll tell you, yes or no, and here’s why, and here’s your break even point based on the salary and the reimbursement rates, et cetera.
00:13:24 Ethan: For us, it all comes back to that perfectly accurate data set. If we had launched, just hypothetically, our AI CFO six months ago, all of the data that we were walking into out of those underwrites was pretty incorrect or outdated. And so if you think about throwing some AI CFO on that solution, it’s not going to tell you anything valuable and it’ll just tell you wrong things if it’ll tell you anything.
0:13:47 Ethan: The calculus of our build has always been getting the data accurate, contextualize in a way that we can use that to power our forthcoming AI solution. But right now we’re just signing up customers because they are on QuickBooks and it’s just not working for them.
00:14:01 Jenny: Slap some AI on that, baby.
00:14:03 Ethan: I always joke that maybe when we fundraise, we’ll lower case Flychain and then just capitalize the AI in Flychain. We were forward thinking when we started the company.
00:14:13 Jenny: Many of us think the idea of selling into any healthcare system provider, clinic, EMR sounds really hard. So what’s your sales cycle like? How hard is it? What’s been your building credibility with these folks because they don’t seem like the easiest lot to deal with?
00:14:32 Ethan: It’s a loaded question and something that we’re constantly thinking about today. Because we’re dealing with that SME universe, distribution is always going to be paramount to us. We think of go-to-market and customers almost in two flavors. You have our partner set and then the direct interactions with our customers. And that’ll always happen no matter what.
00:14:52 Ethan: In terms of finding these businesses, I think one of the biggest things is trust where coming through some validated channel really increases our close rate. In terms of that sales cycle, I’d say 50% of all of our customers close after one 30-minute phone call. The other 50% that close requires maybe two phone calls, and those would usually be with larger organizations.
00:15:13 Ethan: So the actual sales cycle itself is quite short, but when we talk about our distribution, we partner with revenue cycle management providers. We partner with franchises, MSOs, some PE shops.
00:15:25 Ethan: For us to earn our seat at the table there, it’s really understanding the specialty that they’re in and how our product solves a lot of the problems that their customers are facing and in some cases, them as a corporate entity are facing as well.
00:15:38 Ethan: So if you’re a franchise, as an example, you’ve got all these underlying franchisees that have reporting requirements. We’ve signed a few big ones that have 300 underlying franchisees and they’re all sending different Excel files to that channel partner. It’s all apples to oranges to dog food, as we say here. That’s I think how we’re earning the trust, getting some nice more exponential growth.
00:15:59 Ethan: And then the last piece is also just a lot of content marketing for these folks. I think that’s been exciting for us to get a lot of inbounds these days from small to medium sized businesses that we’re talking about the financial challenges that they’re probably experiencing. We’re getting a lot of traction on that front too.
00:16:15 Ethan: But to tie a bow on that answer is when we get on the phone with the healthcare business owner, the biggest way we earn their trust is twofold. It’s empathy. First understanding that they probably don’t have a good grasp on this side of the fence.
00:16:29 Ethan: Meeting them where they are and simplifying that and just making sure that they feel their hand is being held through something that they have generally very little expertise on, if anything.
00:16:39 Ethan: The second though is when we’re talking to different specialties, really understanding the unique nature of that specialty. So I’ll just point to ABA. When we talk to an ABA business owner, we know seasonality.
00:16:50 Ethan: We’re in holiday season, revenues get depressed. So just talking to them and really understanding them and looking them eye to eye and saying, we understand you’re approaching deductible season. We understand the unique complexities that are in ABA versus home health versus dentistry versus primary care.
00:17:07 Ethan: That’s what really sets us apart and gives that inherent level of trust. So it’s a combination of where is the deal coming from? How are we talking to them? And what are the things that we’re mentioning in that specific conversation that solves a very unique issue that we do see across healthcare pretty pervasively.
00:17:24 Jenny: You’ve mentioned some of the challenges, but maybe talk about some of the other things that have been tough for you guys getting this business off the ground the last couple of years.
00:17:33 Ethan: There’s a lot of challenges I’m sure you can appreciate with any early stage company. Distribution, we’re solving that problem. Less and less anxiety related to that.
00:17:42 Ethan: I think some of the challenges that we’ve faced historically were really more on the operational side of the fence because we want to build a very scalable solution. In that first year when we onboarded hundred businesses, in the blocking and tackling of setting up these systems, EMR integrations, bank account, payroll, corporate cards to get this data flowing… it required a lot more work and handholding than we had initially thought.
00:18:04 Ethan: So much of what we’ve spent in 2025 was automating and setting up the right processes to just make sure the data is always streaming. It’s always getting in there accurately. If a connection to a community bank in Nebraska breaks down, how do we get that set up right really quickly again?
00:18:19 Ethan: That was actually probably the biggest problem set that we ran into. It’s those scaling challenges when we’re dealing, especially with an early stage tech company. Where do we source constraints? Where do we pick our battles in terms of integrations and things?
00:18:31 Ethan: But that’s been the biggest learning experience we’ve had as well. How do we deal with these customers and also all these disparate systems and creating a really good technical process, but also almost human in the loop process to guarantee that accuracy.
00:18:45 Ethan: Feeling much better about that now and I’m excited for 2026 because in our opinion, the limit no longer exists where eight months ago we probably couldn’t have been growing as fast.
00:18:56 Jenny: As you get closer and closer to your customers and to these healthcare practices, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing that you guys are all talking about down the road? What’s coming quickly for your community?
00:19:11 Ethan: There’s a few, and I will say it’s also specialty specific. Maybe an overarching theme would be just value-based care, generally speaking.
00:19:19 Jenny: That’s a buzzword.
00:19:20 Ethan: It certainly is. We’ve got some cool partnerships on that side that are really getting us more in the weeds on just value-based care as a whole.
00:19:28 Jenny: Give us the quick couple liners on what value-based care is.
00:19:31 Ethan: So basically you’ve got fee-for-service and value-based care. Fee-for-service is you go, the doctor sees you, they submit to insurance, you get paid for that instance of care. Value-based care takes that different approach. It’s really driven. Your compensation structure is driven based on quality.
00:19:47 Ethan: The whole goal there is by working together as a network of healthcare providers, you get a budget and hey, if you are below that budget and you can all coordinate care, reduce hospital admissions, you then get a balloon payment or a larger payment because you’ve been able to show that you brought a lot of spend out of that community of care delivers.
00:20:06 Ethan: It flips the revenue structure, the financing structure on its head a little bit. From our lens, we’re laser focused on, okay, we know how to account for it, but we also do the financing and how is that going to impact cashflow in the near to medium term? These are all things that we’re constantly thinking about just because we do see that.
00:20:23 Ethan: I will say, it is a slow trend. It’s a buzzword, for sure, but value-based care has been around for quite some time. So I think it’s just a lot of new players or established players are really, really getting a lot of traction on that side. And so we’re there piggybacking alongside a lot of those more value-based care orchestrators to fit into that.
00:20:42 Ethan: The other one, and this is interesting, depending on the specialty and depending on who you talk to, would just also be the consolidation within healthcare. So there’s a lot of roll-ups happening.
00:20:50 Ethan: I’d also say depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re reading, there’s both the rollup and then also in some cases, reversion back to independence. And so regardless of where that pendulum swings, the Flychain has a seat at that table and can work either way. But that’s just another thing.
00:21:06 Ethan: I think we’ve seen a lot of that happen in dentistry, primary care, pediatrics. It does happen in home health, ABA as well. But I think there’s also a lot of narratives out there wanting to stay independent and deliver care on your own terms and part of our… seat at that table is to provide them with the institutional-grade access to data, financial accounting, capital, et cetera. So it gives them a little bit more freedom and stability.
00:21:29 Ethan: I’m by no means a value-based care expert yet, but it’s been really cool to learn here at Flychain. Working with some of the larger players in the value-based care universe that are candidly educating us and figuring out what our roadmap will be to then solve some of those unique challenges in that specific type of construct.
00:21:47 Jenny: I think anyone who’s been to a doctor in the United States, and obviously some places are better than others, but you go and then you get some test results or whatnot and what’s next? It feels so isolated in a moment in time and just not coordinated. Even if they are part of some huge hospital system, they’re basically like, oh, yeah. Go see the other guy.
00:22:05 Jenny: But no one’s following the chain and being the follow-up. And that’s what I feel like we’re so missing in many of our systems. What is the actual end result we’re trying to solve and can we have a coordinated team on it? So one day.
00:22:19 Ethan: One day. There’s always the other side of value-based care where you pull out the budget and then you owe money. That gets scary for us, especially from a lending standpoint, as you can imagine.
00:22:27 Jenny: So what’s one idea that experts in your field, healthcare people, VCs, other founders say that you disagree with?
00:22:34 Ethan: What would have gotten a lot more pushback two years ago when we started, but the objections have maybe slowed down a little bit, but it’s really one thing that we’ve heard a million times. And I would say candidly, a lot of this does come from the VC universe.
00:22:46 Ethan: But why wouldn’t a revenue cycle management provider or an EMR build Flychain? Going back to that narrative around expansion, if you’re a revenue cycle management provider, you make a fair amount of money to grow your business, go to another specialty or go up market. And there’s just so much complexity on that side of the fence.
00:23:04 Ethan: I don’t think those entities have the financial wherewithal to do this. It’s just a fundamentally different company as far as we see it. We partner with all of those entities and there’s no real interest across all of those partners to go on this side of the fence.
00:23:19 Ethan: That’s one thing that we had heard so much, this notion of a business in a box. But at the end of the day, that business in a box does entail a whole different accounting company, a payroll company, EMRs, RCM.
00:23:30 Ethan: There’s a lot of competition on that side of the fence too. So stay in your lane is what we’re seeing those folks do. So that’s probably the biggest one that I would push back on where you don’t want your EMR doing your taxes.
00:23:41 Jenny: No. You don’t want my grandpa. You don’t want your EMR. We haven’t talked about your fabulous co-founder Jaime. So how did you guys meet? Tell us a little bit more about him.
00:23:52 Ethan: We met a while back through this guy, Bill King. He was an investor and advisor at Orchard. I got to know him pretty well over the course of that time and then just stayed in touch.
00:24:03 Ethan: When the pandemic hit, I was bored and living at home and working with Bill King on some cursory ideas of Flychain. That’s when he said, hey, you should meet Jaime. Jaime actually had a class at Stanford with Bill King. Bill moved there, did some distinguished career fellowship, and actually shared a class with Jaime. So they got to know each other shortly after I met Bill at Orchard.
00:24:26 Ethan: So then Bill and I were talking about building some version of Flychain. He said, hey, you should talk to Jaime. He’s moving back to the United States. And then he and I just got on a Zoom when he was in London. And then we said, all right, we’re going to build this company.
00:24:37 Ethan: And we both came back to New York City and kicked this whole journey off. It was really through one individual that connected us that had a lot of years of working with both of us independently and said, Hey, you guys will make a nice match.
00:24:49 Jenny: And you guys have.
00:24:50 Ethan: I like to say he’s fundamentally my better half here.
00:24:53 Jenny: Any secrets to co-founder synergies? That’s always the question that comes up is how do you meet a co-founder?
00:24:59 Ethan: I don’t think there’s ever a silver bullet answer to that necessarily, but the biggest takeaway is being wedded to the journey, not the destination. We both started saying, we’re going to build this whole company. We’re starting off with this little thing and we realized we’re probably going to wade in the dark a little bit for a couple months.
00:25:17 Ethan: When you start off the relationship with that fundamental understanding that we don’t know exactly what we’re going to build, it sets a really nice tone and you’re on the same page from day one. As the relationship grows, there’s division of labor. Who’s got your specific things that you’re really good at. You start delegating as we grow.
00:25:33 Ethan: But a lot of it, honestly, it’s also just a personality. You can see I’m like smiling, talking about Jaime. He’s one of my best friends now and we have a lot of fun too. I would put having fun really high on the list because it can be pretty daunting, annoying. You’re just running through wall after wall and having someone that has also a similar sense of humor as you actually goes a long way when you’re up at 1 a.m. trying to figure something out.
00:25:54 Jenny: But very different skill sets, which I think are complimentary. But as you said, same shared sense of the journey and the mission, which is great.
00:26:02 Ethan: We initially bonded over the mission and Jaime’s background and what he was doing. You should get him on one of these and he can tell you his background, but he was combating some predatory lending that was taking place abroad on the consumer side.
00:26:15 Ethan: I had seen it so prevalently happening in the small to medium sized business universe in the form of those merchant cash advance loan sharks. That’s where we initially bonded. We both don’t like the fact that people are taking advantage of. Let’s start with that first.
00:26:29 Jenny: What’s the one thing that’s keeping you up at night? What are you worried about?
00:26:32 Ethan: I feel like that question is more always what are the negative things that keep you up at night. Those things don’t actually keep me up. I stay up at night because I’ve had too much caffeine.
00:26:42 Ethan: Also, because honestly, we’re just so excited. What I mean by that is I don’t sleep at night because, oh, we can go to all of these health care specialties. There are all these amazing partners that we haven’t even tapped into yet. So that’s actually why I stay up at night.
00:26:55 Jenny: So next time I see him, I’m going to bring you a big bottle of magnesium, because that’s gonna help you sleep.
00:27:00 Jenny: All right. Speed round. So these are just very quick answers to a couple of fun questions. Is there a book, podcast, or some media that you are engaging in right now that you’re enjoying?
00:27:10 Ethan: Oh, I love our podcast, The Flychain Reaction.
00:27:13 Jenny: All right, little plug for the podcast. Tell us about it.
00:27:16 Ethan: I’m kidding. I don’t listen to myself. That’d be weird. But, again, a plug there. Everyone should listen to that. Honestly, a lot of the stuff that I consume is often not related to work. It’s my time away. I will say I’m a huge movie nerd. So I listen to a lot of movie podcasts and watch a lot of movies. So it’s my little escape.
00:27:34 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:27:38 Ethan: This is going to sound weird, but I’d like to maybe move in with one of our customers in Ohio or something.
00:27:44 Jenny: You’re supposed to say Paris or Japan or Rio. That’ll be the first time we have heard that answer.
00:27:51 Ethan: Go to like Reno or something and just hang out with customers. We’ve done a lot of boots on the ground learning. To us, the best way to learn is be side-by-side with your customers. I’m not looking to go anywhere abroad because our market is in the United States.
00:28:06 Jenny: All right. You’re a nerd, but I love it.
00:28:07 Ethan: Actually, we’re about to have a customer in Key West and we have one in Hawaii. So maybe I can pick one of those.
00:28:13 Jenny: I think bunking in with your customer in Hawaii.
00:28:16 Ethan: We have a customer in Hawaii, so I’ll change my answer to Hawaii.
00:28:20 Jenny: Actually, one of our other startups has a customer in Hawaii. We all went for an offsite there last year.
00:28:25 Ethan: There you go.
00:28:26 Jenny: It’s pretty great. Favorite productivity hack?
00:28:29 Ethan: I don’t even know if you want to call it a hack because I feel hack these days are using some AI. But I literally have a one minute stopwatch thing. For me, you’re jumping around calls all day, every day, but every now and then you find yourself with a few minutes of free time and that’s when I’ll hit the timer.
00:28:44 Ethan: If I can get something done in one minute, just go ahead and do it. So to me, it’s almost just an ability to just focus very, very specifically for one minute and you almost carve out that little piece of time to get something done.
00:28:55 Ethan: So I just always have a little one minute stopwatch thing on my desk going to make sure that I can get it done. It’s almost like a little bit of a game and a race. It’s just something I do. Granted, it’s very more personal than some tool that I actually used. It’s a very analog productivity hack.
00:29:09 Jenny: Love that about you, Ethan. And finally, where can listeners find you? Obviously your podcast. What’s the podcast called?
00:29:15 Ethan: It’s called The Flychain Reaction.
00:29:17 Jenny: Love it. And otherwise what? LinkedIn?
00:29:22 Ethan: Absolutely LinkedIn. We’re active on that. I’d also say starting to do some social media. It’s a great way to interact with our customers. But then our website, shoot me an email. We’d always love to chat with anybody, whether that’s an end customer, a partner, what have you, but we’re pretty available and all of our information’s everywhere.
00:29:39 Jenny: On that note, thank you so much, Ethan. This was really fun. I got to know a little bit more about you and your productivity hacks and other tidbits. But I’m actually excited to check out the podcast. The same people that are promoting our podcast or building our podcast, Podmachine, are doing yours, so that’s really fun. Otherwise, best of luck and can’t wait to catch up.
00:29:59 Ethan: Thanks so much for having me, Jenny.
00:30:02 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Ethan Schwarzbach in Founders Everywhere.