Venture Everywhere Podcast: Oban MacTavish with Jenny Fielding

Jenny Fielding, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up Oban MacTavish, co-founder and CEO of Spade on Episode 20: In the Club with Spade

Dec 13, 2023

Listen on Apple, Spotify, Pandora!

In episode 20 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and GP of Everywhere VC, speaks with Oban MacTavish, co-founder and CEO of fintech startup, Spade. Spade provides real-time merchant intelligence such as granular merchant, category, and geolocation details, for the card ecosystem. Oban discusses his journey from a budding investor, to tackling challenges as an early-stage founder, and the determination required to build a startup. He also addresses topics such as overvaluation and promising opportunities within the fintech industry. With a keen focus on Spade's mission and motivation, Oban provides a snapshot of the future of fintech infrastructure.

In this episode, you will hear:

Oban's journey as a “scrappy” entrepreneur and how challenges from his initial venture drove his success with Spade.
Spade’s evolution from a logo API to a fintech infrastructure company, and how to overcome skepticism as an early-stage infrastructure company.
The importance of understanding customer pain points and consistently iterating on the product based on customer feedback.
Discussions on the perception of fintech overvaluation and adapting sales strategies to target mid-market and enterprise customers.
Spade’s vision as the future of money movement infrastructure.

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us and be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and ideas.everywhere.vc on Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

RSS Link

FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Jenny: 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. I hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:21 Jenny: Well, welcome everyone to the Everywhere Podcast. I'm Jenny Fielding and I'm very excited today to have my friend Oban from Spade joining us. So welcome, Oban.

00:00:31 Oban: Hey, thank you. Really excited to be here. For those who don't know who I am, which is probably most people, I'm Oban MacTavish, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Spade. We build transaction infrastructure for card data. So we work with card issuers, banks, fintech companies, anyone who uses cards and help them better understand their data to solve fraud and off more transactions and stuff like that.

00:00:52 Jenny: So I'm going to embarrass Oban for a minute. We were introduced by a founder that I've backed before, who I know quite well. And he sent me a text and he said, "I have a founder for you to meet. You're going to like him. He's a scrappy Jenny founder." So I actually just reread it on my text today. So how do you feel about being called a scrappy founder, Oban?

00:01:18 Oban: I think it's great. Building a company is really hard and I think something that you have to always fall back on is why you're doing it. And I think if things have been too easy or maybe a chip on your shoulder, you might end up wanting to give up because it's not as fun as raising lots of money. You're selling a bunch of software like there's going to be really hard stuff, but I think scrappiness. Everyone I know, who I like the most, all the founders of the world are mostly folks who have a little bit of chip and scrappiness, and I'm glad to include myself in that group of people.

00:01:48 Jenny: 100%, huge, huge compliment for sure. I'd love to kind of start a little bit at the beginning and hear a little bit about what got you on this entrepreneurial journey, some of the inspiration along the way.

00:02:01 Oban: I think, like many people, I might call myself a somewhat reluctant entrepreneur. I started out as someone who was very obsessed with investing, so I was managing money very young, which is kind of a strange thing to say, but I was just -- I loved investing, and I was investing my own money as soon as I could when I was 16, because you can't have your own brokerage account, so I had my dad's.

00:02:21 Oban: And then I decided I wanted to try to manage some other people's money and looked around for some folks who'd like to do that, and people took a risk on me and I did. I did well. I did 300 something percent returns over five or six years.

00:02:33 Oban: In college, I also worked at a software company and did all sorts of stuff. But to be honest, I just wanted to learn and I felt like graduating. There's a very clear path. There is an investment banking job that probably followed by a fund of some kind, and for me I think that was probably going to be a hedge fund if I look back and went on a different path.

00:02:51 Oban: But to me, starting a company was the opportunity to learn more than any other kind of job. And I started a company called Hubly, vertical SaaS for wealth managers, mostly efficiency tech. I was sort of one of the business co-founders there, and that was an incredible experience. Did that for, I guess, a little over two years, and then COVID-19 reared its ugly head as we were raising a seed, and I decided to figure out what I wanted to do next. And consulted for fintech companies and kept hearing about bad data.

00:03:21 Oban: And then one thing led to another and suddenly I'm starting another company, learning all sorts of new things. So that's like the SparksNotes version of where Spade came from, but it did start as a logo API, which I think might have been what I tried to sell you on.

00:03:34 Oban: I don't remember if we had gotten past that point when we had talked to you about Spade. So it’s come a long way, but that's sort of the SparksNotes version of how I ended up here.

00:03:43 Jenny: All right. So a few things from that. If this doesn't work out, we might be managing my money for me, so that's good, there's a career. And then the second thing is the other person. You know, the other thing that the person who introduced us, the founder who introduced us, said, is he scrappy, but first company was not the success he wanted it to be, and so he's hungry to make the next one successful.

00:04:06 Jenny: So what do you think about that? You learn a lot as a first-time entrepreneur. Maybe things don't go exactly the way you want. Does that give you added, kind of hunger for Spade, do you think?

00:04:18 Oban: Absolutely. I mean, I think I've been – I had a very lucky second or luck. Everyone has some luck, but I think a very – an enjoyable second time doing this, because you learn so much about what not to do. But I think you also learn these very valuable lessons of being thankful for when things are going well and just like, I don't know.

00:04:35 Oban: It's hard to describe how painful it is when things aren't going the way you want them to and then having things go the way you want is just like this, I don't know. It's very freeing and also it makes you feel confident. You can take up another big swing. Because, going back to wanting to learn, when I started my first company, I learned a lot. I learned some great things that I've taken forward into Spade and I learned some things not to do.

00:04:55 Oban: But then, when you're doing it again, that feeling of like, wow, this is – all of these things I wanted to do better and I actually get another shot to do it, which is why I think I feel so lucky to be building Spade, surrounded by the investors we have and the people we have, because getting a second shot to do this the right way, I think it's just been, it's unbelievably incredible. And I feel very, very lucky to be able to do that.

00:05:16 Jenny: Awesome! So tell us a little bit more about the product. Where we started recording, you said I'm going to try to describe this in a way that's not confusing. So that's always a challenge, right? When you're not something that's really obvious. So what's your journey been there in terms of coming to the articulation of this and tell us a little bit about it.

00:05:42 Oban: I think we started somewhere very simple and that we gave people logos for transactions, which was all we did initially. And then I think once you have people using your product, especially if you're building, I don't even know if we could really be described as infrastructure at that point, but let's say for simplicity's sake, as we were building infrastructure, they gave you a logo for a card transaction, which is cool.

00:06:01 Oban: But I think you very quickly, once you have people using your product, find novel ways people are using you, but more excitingly, they tell you what they would rather have. And you can very quickly, at least what we found with Spade is you very quickly realize that it's not just a logo. It's a merchant identity and what does that mean? What does someone actually want? What problems are they trying to solve?

00:06:18 Oban: And I think Spade really grew from this very complicated idea where I'm pretty sure at my seed round or pre-seed, I said something like, "I don't really know what the high value use cases are, but I know people really want better data." Even at the earliest stages, there was an enormous pull from every customer we signed on or people we talked to about Spade of how much better would the world be? How much easier would my life be if the data that was coming out of a processor was this?

00:06:43 Oban: That's an insane thing to say to someone that's – at that early stage. Usually there's sort of no consideration for improvement. We essentially took all these learnings and packaged it together, went through a whole re-narrowing of focus and ended up where we are today, which is, I would describe us as building fitting infrastructure for card products.

00:07:00 Oban: So what that means is if you are issuing a card, whether you are a banking as a service platform, a bank. A fintech company building on a banking as a service platform or a card issuer, you need better data to solve the hardest problems you could ever have around fraud, improving the transactions you can offer, deeply understanding what your customers are actually using your financial product for, whether that be underwriting or risk or spending controls if you're a corporate card.

00:07:26 Oban: And the data you have right now is bad and what we do is we make that really, really, really good. We don't just clean. We enrich. And I don't know if I like that word but we really do bring in data you've never seen before and we're giving you in real time. So that was a really jumbled way to describe what we did and clearly I don't know how well it went, but that's in essence what Spade does and where we came from.

00:07:46 Jenny: I think you did a great job. Now you're on this venture capital roller coaster. You closed a really nice round from Andreessen and some other people. What does success for Spade and for you look like?

00:08:00 Oban: You know, I think success for me is just to continue learning. I think obviously there is like, we want to do right by our investors and they've given us an unbelievable amount of faith. And I take it very seriously the fact that we started on this journey. But for me, I think I just want to keep learning.

00:08:13 Oban: I want to hopefully by the time this journey is done, wherever that ends up at, I can look back and say, wow, like, when I said, hey, this is the best way to learn about pretty much anything, I was right. And I shouldn't have gone down a different path. But for Spade, I think success is building something great.

00:08:27 Oban: And I think great has a lot of different definitions and great doesn't mean necessarily a publicly traded company or a $10 billion acquisition to some financial services company, I think great is something that has enormous impact, whether it be on the lives of like your employees, yourself, your investors, but also on whatever industry you decide to tackle.

00:08:45 Oban: One of the reasons I wanted to build in fintech when healthcare sounds pretty cool and dev tools sounds pretty fun too. And there's lots of interesting places you could build is that fintech touches every aspect of people's lives. I think we forget how important financial products are to people because, you know, maybe it's a dirty thing to say, but like, the ability to be banked or the alternatives to using a card or reducing fraud.

00:09:06 Oban: All these costs are often borne by the consumer or the card holder. And if we can make fraud reduction happen at a higher clip, if we can help your bank better understand you to give you the right financial products, there's just these massive externalities I think that exist within fintech. And that's what success looks like to me as Spade can look around one day and say, oh my God, what percentage of all card transactions that happen in the world are being run through our platform?

00:09:27 Oban: You know, if we're getting that to 1%, 2%, 10%, 50%, I mean, 100%, I think that's really success. And if that happens to make ourselves and our incredible investors financially successful, I'm not going to argue with that either.

00:09:39 Jenny: Love it. So you use the word impact a few times. Talk about some of the people that have been impactful on your journey. You mentioned your dad letting you trade at a young age. And who are some of the people that have been influential in this journey?

00:09:53 Oban: That's a hard question. I think there's a lot of people you can name. So I'm going to try to keep it as not too long of a list. I could probably go out for a long time. I think, to give a shout out to Tommy Nicholas, CEO of Alloy, who took the opportunity to speak to me after I'm pretty sure I emailed him a hundred times. He was the person who interviewed our last company to get into Techstars. Shout out to Techstars.

00:10:16 Oban: And then gave me the time of day as some random founder who we talked to once on the phone. I think he got pizza with us maybe about some harebrained at that point, really like not a company of an idea we had and respected it enough to give me feedback and take it seriously, I think was he's someone who I've always been thankful for and then introduced me to you, who was so impactful in raising our pre-seed round and helped us give me the feedback and helped sort of turn me to the person I am now, but also turn Spade the company is today.

00:10:45 Oban: But I think there are few founders, there are many incredible founders and I feel bad not mentioning so many others. But Tommy was one of the people who treated me with respect at a time when many people laughed at startup founders who show up with legitimately a very poorly formed idea potentially, but he attacked it critically, but also gave me the advice and connected me to the people because he saw something. I mean, I think I have to give him a shout out for that. That's one person.

00:11:11 Oban: You know, my family, my fiance, who supported me even when we were in a one tiny one bedroom apartment, she heard me pitching you among every other investor we had. I think that's quite a unique COVID pitching experience. But she was there and I think I told her, "Hey, I have this thing, I'm gonna try to raise money, give me three months." That's about how much money I left from my bank account at that point. And thankfully she was like, "Yeah, okay. Let's still see, let's see how it goes." It turned out and we did close around our pre-seed, but yeah, those are some people.

00:11:42 Jenny: Shout out to those early, early believers.

00:11:44 Oban: Yes, absolutely.

00:11:46 Jenny: So as you think about getting the company going in the early days, what were some of the challenges would you say that you had to overcome? A lot of folks listening to this podcast are early stage founders and they're just kind of figuring stuff out. Every day feels like a high high and a low low. What were some of the things that you kind of had to struggle with or just like figure out in the early days?

00:12:08 Oban: I know, I think I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about infrastructure as a business. So this is kind of slanted towards that. But I think people underestimate how difficult it is to have people take risks on you, I think, when you're building infrastructure. And for us, that was a huge hurdle for us to overcome.

00:12:25 Oban: If I'm just telling you here, get a logo on your transaction, it's kind of easy. Someone's like, "Okay, worst case scenario, something that's not Target has a little Target logo next to it. What's the risk there?" But if you're dealing with things that are hard and valuable like fraud or credit card authorization period or any sort of core - if you're really solving pain for your customers, there's going to be, I think, a little bit of fear about handing off whatever that solution is to you.

00:12:50 Oban: And I think that was one of the biggest things we had to overcome was: not only did we have at that point, we had no backing, but we were getting people to put us in their data stream and to trust us with their data, to trust us with solving a hard problem, to build a core feature on with no funding. And I think that was one of the biggest things we had to overcome.

00:13:08 Oban: Oh yeah. Here's one simple trick. I have the whole thing solved because I think we're still working on that. But I do think that building trust with your customers and sitting down with them and taking the time as a founder, even when everything is going crazy and just making them know something they can trust you is so -- At least when you're building infrastructure, it's such a core part.

00:13:27 Oban: I think of what we did incredibly well and why when we went out to raise, people were just shocked at how many people are using it despite us not being incorporated or like a – let's call it a super big business or anything like that. There's just trust, I think is probably one of the hardest things we had to overcome.

00:13:43 Jenny: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I noticed was just how much time you guys spent with your customers. And if you needed to fly to New York to meet them, or if you needed to do whatever, like you really wanted to understand them better and serve their needs, which is really impressive.

00:14:01 Jenny: A lot of founders, I think they stick with their vision and they're kind of like, "Okay, if this one doesn't want it, someone else will want it." But I really like -- had your ear to the ground of what the real pain points were. So that was something that always struck me.

00:14:13 Oban: I think that really comes from the scrappiness of wanting to make it happen. I think a lot of folks, this was a strange time in the venture world. You could raise a lot of money with very little progress. And I think a lot of folks were excited and if you created hype, you could sort of play people off and like that was happening all over the place. And I don't want to comment on that part of it, but what I will say is that when it comes down to it, like you still have to build a business.

00:14:37 Oban: You can collect a great salary and sit around, but if you want to build something great, it's going to be really, really hard and you have to just make it happen. And I think for me, what, making it happen always meant, was diving in with the person or something happens with your product. You email every single one of them and you're answering every Slack.

00:14:52 Oban: And even if there's no one. My co-founder, Cooper, when something went wrong a long time ago, I don't even remember if we had, maybe had a couple people, it was the alpha version of our product and he just worked until it was done. There is no like, "Oh! Time to clock out?" No, you just do it until it's fixed or do it until it's sold or meet with VCs until you're done raising.

00:15:12 Oban: And I think people sometimes think being a founder is fun and easy and it is fun. And I'm so happy I'm doing it. But it has moments where you're like, you will just work until you're done. And done is a – is, could be a long time or a little time, but I think that's really what drove Spade and got us where we are today in solving really hard problems for people.

00:15:31 Jenny: So I'd love to stick with that because you and I had this conversation recently. You obviously have an incredible amount of drive, not necessarily reflected in the community that you come from. Where do you think that drive comes from, just to work? Where do you think the inspiration for that is?

00:15:52 Oban: For me, it's a lot to do with learning and maybe a sense of luckiness. I think a lot of folks, I went to a school in Canada, which is like - shout out to my UBC where I studied, but it’s not like some schools and I won't name names, but there's just certain advantages, I think in certain circles. There's like an assumption of quality or an assumption of intellectual horsepower, whatever you wanna say about it.

00:16:15 Oban: I think I've always just very much felt like, if I had the opportunity, I could. In the same way I felt about investing. I was like, "Well, no one would wanna take a shot at you if you didn't go to some fancy school or work at a hedge fund," or whatever. But then you meet these people and you prove yourself to them. And that like wanting to prove myself inherently is I think a lot of what drives Spade and that I got the opportunity to do it again.

00:16:32 Oban: Co-founded another company and still exists and they're such great folks. And I learned so much, but it wasn't the outcome I wanted. The opportunity to give it again means that I'm like, "Okay, this time, I'm going to prove that 99 out of 100 times you bet on me, you're going to win because I will make it happen."

00:16:48 Oban: And that's because most people don't get two shots. Very few people get one shot actually, which I think is kind of the sad part about all this, and I got two. So there's no way I'm wasting this. I'm going to make it happen regardless of your background or where you go to school or whatever like that.

00:17:01 Jenny: That's a great sound bite for sure.

00:17:04 Oban: Yeah! I know.

00:17:06 Jenny: With that, what's the vision for Spade? Where are you guys going and what should we be looking out for?

00:17:12 Oban: One of the cool things about building infrastructure is that oftentimes if you do things right, you're going to end up in a position with so many opportunities and that's a little bit of a cop out. But I think what I really want to do is, I think we're building the infrastructure that should be repeated in things like transfers and things like real-time payments and in any card transaction.

00:17:30 Oban: And I think, the vision for Spade is that we build the future of money movement infrastructure. Whether it's happening on a card or a transfer or any other type of financial instrument, I think there should be more information that exists about the parties involved.

00:17:44 Oban: I think the craziest thing about the financial institutions is that there's so much information about people's behavior now. There's services like Incognia or Sardine or any of these other folks who are experts in how you engage with your phone and your car. They know all sorts of stuff about it. Your bank actually knows you really well.

00:18:00 Oban: They actually have no idea where you're spending your money without enormous investment from their part. And I think I want to fix that. I think if you're sending, if someone's trying to pull money out of your account via an ACH, we should know where that business was incorporated and what they do and how much money they make and all of this information that exists in these very disparate systems.

00:18:15 Oban: And I think what Spade is doing is working towards that future where if you're swiping a card, the issuing bank has a very clear idea of where you're spending your money. If you're sending money, we know where it's ending up. The value that creates can be captured in, I mean, countless different ways, but I think that's really what we're building towards this Spade.

00:18:32 Jenny: Awesome. I like that. When I think about what people are saying about fintech right now, because I am a big fintech investor and the public markets, things are not doing so well. Even in the private markets, people are kind of like, "Ugh, fintech’s really inflated or very expensive." How do you respond to that?

00:18:51 Jenny: For me, I'm a long-term investor. So I'm like, "We’re investing in companies that are going to do big things, but not for 10 years," right? So I don't know, I have to look to the future. But sometimes it weighs on you a little bit. We were like, "Wow, I'm putting a lot of time, money and energy into a sector that people think is potentially not as big as we thought it was two years ago." How does that make you feel and where do you land on that?

00:19:17 Oban: It's interesting. Again, I might answer most of these questions from an infrastructure perspective. So obviously, fintech is huge. What percentage of the US GDP? It's a lot. I can't remember. I'm pretty sure I heard that on a podcast. I'd quote that number. I was like, "That's a lot." So we could all agree it's a lot of money that moves in and out of the financial world, which means there's a lot of opportunity.

00:19:36 Oban: I think the way I look at it is that, I guess there's two worlds that look at this because a lot of money flowed into fintech and a lot of companies were created. And many of them, I'm sure, I know some incredible fintech founders. There's going to be enormous outcomes for them and their companies and they're really changing the world. And with any sector that there's a lot of opportunity, many, many companies get funded, period.

00:19:56 Oban: I think this whole narrative about fintech being overvalued, I think you could probably zoom out and say that about every single venture-backed industry. I mean, look at – AI is incredible. Who's to say that's not going to be seen as overvalued? I mean, you go back to any bubble or moment in time where an industry becomes, explodes into the limelight, there's going to be a lot of funding that flows there.

00:20:17 Oban: I do think that from an infrastructure perspective though, it did for me really make me rethink some of the strategies, the playbooks that I think that existed in the past. There was very much a playbook, the Stripe, the Classic, you sell to all the small startups, and then three of them become your biggest customers, 10 of them become your biggest customers, and then you take a lot of the -- You become big because of that.

00:20:38 Oban: I think that's very lightning in a bottle. I don't know if that's a repeatable sales model. I mean, the call sets are pretty incredible. And when I look at what decisions we're making at Spade, given this market backdrop, it's about, if you're going to build fintech, it can't just be for the startups, I don't think. And you see that all over the place.

00:20:53 Oban: You see the movement to mid-market and enterprise is happening as we speak. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I took away or my reaction to this sort of thing is like, okay, it's true. We were at a period in time, the number of fintech companies founded were like, I don't even know what the number is and I'm sure it's incredibly high. It's a lot.

00:21:09 Oban: What I would say is that when we were looking at that, I said, "Well, how can we sell this to banks?" How can we sell our products to the original, let's call it the original fintechs, the JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Capital One, Wells Fargo? I mean, for us at least, fintechs aren't the only people who exist within the universal financial services. And I believe the value can be created by selling directly to people who – the more traditional players let’s call it.

00:21:31 Jenny: One of the things I actually always liked about you and still admire about you honestly, is you're very responsive. Like you're really on top of things. People say that about me all the time, like Jenny don't you have 250 portfolio companies and yet you respond in two seconds. And so that's like one of the things that I've just gotten really good at over the years is just having my act together, figuring out productivity for people that work for me. Any hacks or tools or things that you do to stay so organized and so on top of stuff?

00:22:06 Oban: I don't know if I personally would describe myself as organized. I think I'll start there. I think, I don't know why, but there are certain kinds of people, maybe they don't respond to your email, but they will use the Calendly link or they'll send you a three word response. But the ability to be instantly responsive, I think, is in some ways part of the CEO's job. Now, that is to say you can respond to everyone.

00:22:27 Oban: You put up a job posting and there's 800 services who are trying to sell you other recruiting services. Please don't reach out to me. I think I could just say that. And for every founder elsewhere, we do not want that. So you're not going to respond to those and cold outreach and such like that.

00:22:39 Oban: But I think the ability to make yourself available at a moment's notice, I think is an underappreciated skill and something that when the number of people I know in my circle who have helped me. At the drop of a hat, I think you repay that favor with those folks.

00:22:53 Oban: I also maybe – I block time in my calendar for specific emails or follow-ups and stuff like that, which is annoying for sales calls, but it's also very helpful for me. But yeah, I think it sounds terrible because I feel like I'm like, "Oh, work-life balance."

00:23:06 Oban: But like legitimately, if you have your phone and it's important, taking the second to respond, I think is you notice, people notice. People will notice if you instantly respond. They'll also notice when you don't respond, so be apologetic, I guess. That's my Canadian coming out of me. Yeah, that's my productivity hack.

00:23:21 Jenny: My next question was gonna be, what's your superpower? So you're saying that your superpower is not being organized, although, I think you're organized. I'm just saying that you are very proactive and responsive, but what would you say is your superpower?

00:23:35 Oban: You know, these are very like self-aggrandizing answers, but I do think I'm able to articulate and set a vision for Spade in a way that many of the great founders I've met, I tried to emulate, are capable of, because I think vision really does sort of snowball into everything.

00:23:50 Oban: No one wants to join your company if you're not super clear about why it's such a massive opportunity. And I don't even say that you have to say these are the three features I'm going to release this year, because most, many founders don't even know that. That's included for much of our life.

00:24:03 Oban: But the ability to articulate why – what you're building is so incredibly valuable to investors, customers, and your team, I think is what I'm good at because I've managed to, despite not coming from the fanciest school and things like that, and coming from Canada, which is not the worst place to come from, but certainly create some barriers, managed to surround myself with what I think is some incredible, incredible investors, mentors, advisors, angels, employees, customers.

00:24:27 Oban: And much of that comes down to my ability to say, "Hey, I'm going to make it happen. And this is why it's going to be so incredible when we get there together" And I think that is my superpower and why we've managed to do what we have, despite competitive industry and the backdrop of fintech or whatever we want to call it.

00:24:44 Jenny: That's awesome. Okay. We're about to wrap it up. We'll do our quick speed round. So these are just quick one or two word answers. Is there a book or a podcast that you're reading that you're really enjoying now?

00:24:56 Oban: I am a huge sucker for Logan Bartlett's Cartoon Avatars podcast. I guess the Logan Bartlett podcast is my favorite podcast right now.

00:25:06 Jenny: Awesome! If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:25:11 Oban: I'd say New York, but I guess that's happening soon. So that - New York.

00:25:17 Jenny: What's the origin of your first name?

00:25:19 Oban: It is a town in Scotland, and I'm named after a great uncle who is somehow related to that town. I'm not sure if he came from there. He was also named after the town, but there's a town in Scotland and there's scotch too. So...

00:25:30 Jenny: I've always wanted to ask you that.

00:25:31 Oban: Yeah.

00:25:32 Jenny: Now I can do it publicly.

00:25:33 Oban: Exactly.

00:25:34 Jenny: Where can listeners find you?

00:25:35 Oban: Not my personal email, but spade.com is probably the best place. You can reach out there. I think hello@spade.com, but yeah, just go to spade.com. That's the place.

00:25:45 Jenny: Awesome! Well, Oban, this has been super fun. You're a great guest and thank you so much for your time.

00:25:50 Oban: Thanks for having me. It was great.

00:25:52 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 about everywhere, we’re a first check preseed fund that does exactly that. We invest 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.