Carry acquired by AngelList and Lettuce Financial in split deal — founder Ankur Nagpal on building for solopreneurs

He he is invested in all sorts of things. So, he will be uh disclosing all of that. I'm sure people will dig in more as he uh goes towards the committee vote. Um, but uh without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Anker from Kerry. is the founder and is here with an exciting M&A update. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Looks like Looks like we both have some M&A to announce in the last couple of weeks. Yeah.

Yes. Uh talk us first. Let's start uh

let's start with the gong.

Let's start with the gong. Let's hit the gong for the deal.

There we go.

Now we can continue. But let's uh yeah let's talk about uh the the company that you built the background maybe your background even before starting this company that was just acquired.

Yeah absolutely before this I used to run a company called teachable.com which helped people make money online for the first time. So it helped people create online courses and coaching and um had a successful exit there during the pandemic. took a couple of years off trying to figure out what I wanted to build and then I started Kerry uh about three and a half years ago and the mission with Kerry was we help people first make money online now we'll help them grow their net worth be smart about taxes um I think I came on the show last to talk about taxes so a lot of that stuff and now here we are three and a half years later excited to share that we've been acquired by two separate companies

yeah explain that that it feels very uncommon how did this happen what who's going where the how did this like it's my second exit. I want to get acquired twice this time. The next company you might get four different

Yeah.

Yeah. Twice the diligence, you know, nothing like like running two simultaneous M&A processes. Um but no, the overall company is bought by Angelist, which is a platform I've had a long-standing relationship with. I, you know, my first company raised money on Angelist. I hired my a lot of my team there. I ran my funds there. Um they saw the marketing engine we've built. they saw our ability to build and launch financial products and they wanted to buy us to build and launch new financial products to make the private markets more accessible.

Um, as they did this, you know, we obviously have built what I consider to be the best solo 401k self-employed retirement platform. They didn't really have a logical kind of use for that asset. So, we partnered with a company called Lettuce Financial that does tax, bookkeeping, payroll, insurance for self-employed people. And that's where we're selling the retirement platform.

Okay. So it's almost two two separate acquisitions.

So yeah, what does that look like from a customer perspective? I mean, maybe walk me through the fir like the the actual go to market for the company while you were building it, what the last couple years looked like. Uh because then we can go into you know where what the experience for the customers is like.

Yeah. So uh our go to market which I think we we were quite good at is we never spent a single dollar on paid marketing. I think a lot of it was content education.

Um, teaching people about the insanity of the tax code, which is there's something fitting, by the way, on announcing our acquisition on April 15th. It was completely unintentional,

but it's it's funny. It's funny how that happened.

Um, but yeah,

the amount the amount of times I would read like one of your posts and then send it to my CPA and just be like, "Please make sure that we're doing

following this.

You're doing this."

So, yeah. I mean, was the was the marketing strategy go direct or were you doing I mean, it sounds like content education.

Content education content work the best.

Um, we had a personal finance newsletter with over 100,000 people which worked quite well.

Um, Twitter has always worked well. I I do think there's some percentage people who follow me on Twitter are going to be relieved to see less tax content and a lot of buddies be like, "Dude, like Leo." uh but but look I think you know I'm excited for the next chapter with the angelist where we will apply a lot of the same you know go to market to launch new products for the private markets um meanwhile lettuce is the platform stays exactly the same customers will you know only get a better experience since lettuce allows people to also do taxes payroll health insurance for self-employed people I'll continue to stay involved there as well um with more of my day-to-day time on Angelist but most of the teams ends up going to lettuce.

Yeah. What was uh what was the founding team like? Who did you hire? How big did the company get? Talk to me about like the shape of the company.

Yeah, absolutely. So, we we got to about 25 people, about 4 million in ARR. Um founding team had, you know, four four other co-founders

and yeah, it was it was the business was at a point where was growing quite nicely where we got to about 250 million in assets on the platform. Um, however, looking at all the things happening in the market today, you know, you look at it and I'm like, three and a half years in, four million RR, it's a good business, but you look at some of these modern AI companies and you're like, wow, you know, it's it's a good business, not a not not sort of the crazy multiples you see these days.

Yeah. How do you think about the the the I mean, I guess like level set for me on the boom of the soloreneur like what have you seen there? What what what what has stuck out to you? And then I want to talk about uh that in the context of Angelist. Yeah. So we stumbled upon this in my last company where for the first time we saw you know tens of millions of people start a business online. I think marketplaces made it very easy for anyone to get attention and when you got attention you could start to monetize this. Mhm.

So saw that first happening at Teachable, but then kind of kept investing in the creator economy and seeing the growth of that that when it came time to launch the new business, which is Carrie at the time, realized that like so many things are provided to you by your job like your retirement plan, your insurance, all of that. As a self-employed person, you may be financially doing quite well,

but you have to go figure it out for yourself. Mhm.

Um, and the solo 401k specifically was one of those too good to be true sort of personal finance things where it's a private 401k plan just for yourself. You can invest in literally any asset you want. Um, your money grows and compounds taxfree. You can use it all to contribute to a Roth IRA. You can borrow money from it. You can get a tax credit for setting one up. I was reading this and I'm like this is insane. Like why why isn't anyone like doing anything about it? So that's where we built Carrie where you know we kind of helped I think 4,000 separate people set up their retirement plans and custody their dollars and all of that.

Um and then within the angelist ecosystem, how do you see it feels like there's a continuation of the soloreneur boom vibe coding is obviously a big piece of that. Uh I I I definitely agree with a lot of people that have tal come on the show and talked about this idea that uh maybe we're not at a oneperson 1 billion company yet, but uh just the ability to build something that is software with a smaller leaner team sort of lends itself to maybe lower capital requirements, not needing to go the the traditional venture path because it might look more like a lifestyle business. But I'm wondering how you think the financial markets will react to that dynamic. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing a lot the rise of the one person business is only becoming bigger, but the angelist acquisition was also we spent a lot of our time educating people on investing and

you know being smarter with money and I think there's still a big opportunity to make private markets more accessible. I mean we're seeing this with companies going public later and later so much of the wealth creation people are locked out of. I mean, you can

Yeah.

And like, come on. You can you can buy prediction market contracts on how long a handshake will last. You can, you know, gamble on shitcoins. So, I don't really buy the whole like we're protecting people angle.

Sure.

Um, so the idea with Angelist is we're going to spend some time and figure out sort of how can we take some of this wealth creation that's historically been uh only for a very few people and make it more accessible, but in a way that's actually, you know, fundamentally good and investor-friendly products.

Yeah. Um what in in a perfect scenario, do you think that the uh the public funds that invest in private market companies should be basically valued at 1x nav because we've seen a couple things go out and they get really highly valued and it feels like uh some sort of like okay the market's not efficient here. Yeah, I mean I think there's there's a couple of very very big IPOs coming up that will that will determine I think like I know I'm going to sound dramatic but the future of the private markets in a lot of ways because there is such a massive disconnect right now where

you have so many fundamentally good companies in the public markets getting completely slaughtered. Uh meanwhile all kinds of private businesses are are you know continuing to rip. So I think I think there's going to be a reckoning. I think you know companies are staying private longer. U but you know I mean like I would I would imagine anthropic and open AI have unofficial markets that make them more traded than a lot of public securities. So like you know the the line is blurring. There are effectively stock prices for a lot of these latest stage private companies. So I think it's a really interesting time. Um and it's to me inevitable that we allow private markets to access more of this.

Yeah. Makes sense. Uh well, I know you guys have some big news coming up, so I have a lot more questions, but we'll save it uh for when you guys are ready to announce, which uh I'm looking forward to. But uh congratulations to the whole team. I think it's super smart to, you know, make this decision and I can't wait to see uh what you do at Angelus. It's going to be incredible.

Yep. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me