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When you have been covering fintech as long as I have you get to know others in the space doing similar things. Zack Miller, the founder and managing editor of Tearsheet, was writing about fintech and interviewing people as I was getting serious about fintech lending back in 2012.
Since I no longer own a fintech media company, we are no longer competitors so I wanted to get him on the show to talk about Tearsheet. He has done a great job building it up into one of the leading media companies in fintech today.
In this podcast you will learn:
- How Tearsheet went from a passion project to a fintech media business.
- How they started doing small-scale high-end events.
- What they found out in their Gen-Z working group.
- The different components of Tearsheet and how they make money.
- How they decide what goes into their content.
- How to build trust with the largest financial institutions.
- The trends that Zack is looking at most closely.
- What banks have learned from their fintech partnerships.
- Why he is still a big fan of blockchain.
- What the future holds for Tearsheet.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 509 – ZACK MILLER
Peter Renton: Welcome. After more than 500 episodes, I have decided to give the Fintech One-on-One Podcast a bit of a refresh. You’ll notice new music, a new intro, better sound quality, and some more subtle differences as well. And we’ll also be launching some new features soon. Of course, you still get the same quality interviews that have made this one of the most downloaded podcasts in fintech.
Zack Miller: When it came time to put together a working group of around 12 people, very senior people sitting around the table, mostly product people or strategy people at some of the largest banks, Gen Z, even though it was top of everybody’s list, the most surprising thing to me, I think looking back, it’s not so surprising, they actually don’t have a plan for how to address Gen Z.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I have been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives.
On the show today, we have Zack Miller, the founder and managing editor of Tearsheet, one of the leading publications focused on the impact of technology on financial services. I’ve known Zach for many years. In this episode, we talk about what makes Tearsheet click and how it stands out from the many other offerings in the space today. We talk about the details of their new working groups, particularly the Gen Z working group, which was really interesting. He also talks about what he finds most engaging today in fintech, and the most important trends he’s seeing. He talks about where he’s taking Tearsheet and much more. Now let’s get on with the show.
Welcome to the podcast, Zack.
Zack Miller: It’s great to be here. Good to see you, Peter.
PR: Good to see you. You go back further than I do in many ways in this space, or as far, because the first time I learned about you was when you were interviewing Renaud Laplanche all the way back in 2012. I still remember that interview, actually.
ZM: Was it was that long ago?
PR: It was, and I remember it because back then, peer-to-peer lending was a little thing, and it just wasn’t very popular. So I know that was one of your early podcasts. Why don’t you give us what you’ve been doing for the last 10 to 12 years, starting off with the Tradestreaming.
ZM: Yeah, so I’m not going to get the dates right. Because my brain doesn’t work that way, but yes, it is amazing that we go back that far. I started a podcast and a newsletter back then really as a mechanism to meet people in fintech. I was an entrepreneur, investor, and employee at some early-stage fintech companies. We weren’t calling it fintech back then.
PR: Right.
ZM: And you know, you were one of the few people who were actively writing about their experiences in peer-to-peer lending as a new asset class. So, I wrote a book called “Tradestream Your Way to Profits, Building a Killer Portfolio in the Age of Social Media”. This podcast/newsletter was really all about meeting people like you and the entrepreneurs behind the companies like Renaud Laplanche at Lending Club and hearing what they’re doing and how they’re doing in it and being able then to translate that for investors so that they can use some of these strategies and employ them on their own. What I do today is different than that, but that was the starting point. It gave me an opportunity to meet people like yourself and Renaud. I ended up doing some customer acquisition work for Lending Club. I was a consultant as well. And so some of those early conversations and connections turned into relationships and business for me as well.
PR: So then how did you go from there – you had a blog, you wrote a book, a podcast – how did you go from there to where you are today? Take us through the history of the last, what is it, 12, 13 years.
ZM: Yeah, so most of the time, Tradestreaming, which eventually turned into Tearsheet, which I’m doing today, was a hobby. This was something I did on the side. I was a co-founder of a company called OurCrowd, which has done $2 billion in private transactions and to startups. I was the head of marketing there. Tearsheet again was just something I enjoyed doing. It was a passion project. It was something that I would do in the evenings and get a chance to meet people. It was on the advice of a friend, an ad tech executive founder in 2015, who came to me, and obviously fintech was ramping at that point. I was at OurCrowd, and he said, “Do you think you could turn your newsletter and podcast into a business?” I said, “Maybe”. And so he ended up investing. We got Digiday to invest, a niche media publication in New York focused on the business of publishers and marketing and advertisers, and they invested in us. They were looking to expand into other verticals like finance, and we took what was a hobby into trying to make a business out of it. And as you know, the media business is not necessarily a complicated one, but it’s not an easy one either. Building an audience, monetizing the audience, and finding opportunities to both ensure that you’re giving accurate and objective information while also being able to monetize. That’s also evolved; we can talk about that if you’re interested. It was in 2015 that we ended up taking that first investment. Digiday eventually acquired Tearsheet. We went from Tradestreaming and launched a new brand called Tearsheet in an effort to refresh the brand. And we’re really focused on creating content for you if you’re a product person, marketing person, digital person, at an incumbent financial organization. I don’t know if you remember back in the 90s with faxes, where brokers would come into the office and tear a sheet off of the fax. Tearsheet was always intended to be the one-pager of everything they needed for that day. And we modeled it out like if you had one resource to read every day as an executive, this would be the resource you would read. So it was a blend of our own reporting and aggregation and helping those guys who are sitting within the biggest traditional institutions to make sense of where the business was headed, not futuristically, but three years out, four years out, five years out. And so, we were really able to pinpoint the trends and the types of technologies and companies that were going to impact their business in the future.
PR: Right, right. So it’s interesting because you and I do have quite parallel kind of paths here. I started writing about it in 2010 as a bit of a side project as well and really started to get into it. What happened with my path is that I obviously went into the large-scale conference business. But you guys have been doing conferences on a small scale for quite some time. Tell us how that evolved.
ZM: As an attendee of the LendIt conferences in the past and Fintech Nexus, they were great. Those were super impactful industry-wide conferences. We never had the deep enough pockets or the resolve really to do an event like that.
PR: You need both those, but I know that for a fact.
ZM: Yes, exactly. One without the other does not win in that game. I know that. I’ve learned enough the hard way. But Digiday had a model for doing high-end events. We’re talking 50, 60 people in a room, taking them away from their office for three days, typically, outside of New York City, going to Colorado, to Miami, back when Miami was not a thing, and getting people to really unplug from what they needed to do and really engage with their fellow conference goers. And more than just passive listening and checking your phone, these are active events, and we’ve evolved them over time. So we typically do events with 50 to a hundred people where we’re now breaking out into working groups, where this is a formalized model of, “Hey, what are the biggest issues in your lives right now?” How do we get the smartest people in the room around the table to have an open, private conversation in confidence where you really can share some of the issues that you have both internally, maybe your own skill set, or maybe your organization hasn’t been supportive? How do we as a community address these issues to move beyond that together? And to me, that’s where all the magic happens. These are small events. People get a chance to know one another. It doesn’t resonate for everybody. If you’re a sales guy and you’re looking at going to a LendIt conference to bring home lots of leads and stuff like that, that’s not what the Tearsheet conferences do. It’s really more content-driven and more relationship-driven, I would say.
PR: Right, gotcha. I wanted to dig into those working groups because I read that you launched a Gen Z working group, right?
ZM: Mm-hmm, that was our first one.
PR: And that was as a parent of two Gen Zs and seeing how they consume technology and financial services differently to previous generations. So tell us a little bit about how that has gone, and what did you find out?
ZM: So I would say around the summer of 2023, we polled our audience at one of our conferences about “What are the top three issues you have facing your business today?” Without fail, addressing Gen Z customers came up in the vast majority of questions that we asked people. So we said, great, we’ll start with these working groups around Gen Z. We heard from our audience, and this is an issue that they have. Now, I confirmed that multiple times. I did discovery calls with our audience to hear more about their challenges around Gen Z. When it came time to put together a working group of around 12 people, very senior people sitting around the table, mostly product people or strategy people at some of the largest banks, Gen Z, even though it was top of everybody’s list, the most surprising thing to me, I think looking back, it’s not so surprising, they actually don’t have a plan for how to address Gen Z. It is the largest generation in history. And really when we sat around and we met in person in Manhattan for two and a half hours one Friday. And as we started to get comfortable revealing things to one another, we started asking “ Well, what are you doing? Well, what are you doing?” Nobody had a plan. But even more than that, they weren’t even sure that it was worthwhile building for this generation. And I’m talking about some of the most senior people in the industry, meaning our products and services don’t resonate with today’s youth. We’re not sure they may ever resonate with today’s youth, or what we’d have to do and build to reach that customer, maybe it’s not worth it because right now they’re not generating any money for us. Again, a very short-sighted view.
PR: Wow, yeah.
ZM: But they were asking that question. I think, and I keep saying this at all of our working groups, I think the success of the working group was that everybody said something around the table that would have gotten them fired. But that showed the honesty. And I was surprised. I was happy to hear our participants be able to get that real. But that’s an issue. It’s not just customers of Gen Z. It’s also hiring employees as Gen Z. We hear this in a lot of our working groups on other subjects. It’s like, you know, “I’ve got these Gen Z employees and I don’t know how to motivate them. I don’t know how to get them to work”. There are all kinds of issues around tackling this generation. And I don’t think we’ve even begun to scratch the surface and be able to solve that.
PR: Right. So then, at the end of this, is the working group ongoing or is it, or is it a fixed-length program?
ZM: So we’re experimenting with different types. This Gen Z one met once in person; we kicked off the working group for two and a half hours, and BCG hosted it in their offices. And then we met three more times online. So we had that first interaction in person, which was fantastic, because the magic happens when you put good people in a room together. And then the other three were online. And that is in contradistinction to some other working groups that we’ve done, which we do every month. For example, we have a 90-minute call for marketers in financial services. We have another one for comms and PR people. Those are repetitive, periodic ones that meet every month. And then we’ve done some like we just did our Big Bank Theory Conference, it is our flagship conference. And that was a one-time meeting all day. We spent eight hours in a room together, tackling all the biggest issues around banking. For some people, meeting in person is a need, and they need to get out of the office; they want to unplug from everything. Other people appreciate being able to log in from wherever they are in the world and participate like that. There isn’t one right model or not. We’re still continuing to experiment with this.
PR: So I’m just curious out of the Gen Z. Did anything get resolved in that? The bankers that were members of your working group, I imagine they learned something. Are some of these banks just abandoning Gen Z? Because to me, that would be just insane. The largest generation ever.
ZM: No. And certain banks admitted in the group that they can’t even afford to risk abandoning them, even if the odds are on our side, because it’s an existential issue, particularly for plain vanilla type institutions. So we didn’t solve for anything. I think that’s also an issue. We weren’t aiming to solve for anything. We did put together a roadmap in the form of a manifesto of like, here are the top 10 things that will guide our continuing to learn, experiment and build for this audience, even if we do it slowly. We came out with some research, which I’m happy to share with you. You can include that in the show notes. But we also came out with this roadmap for people. And so we wanted this to be able to guide them to bring back to their institutions as overarching principles to be able to say, “Hey, we don’t know, we don’t have this solved. There’s a lot of unknowns right now, but we are going to take a big step towards them. And here’s how we’re going to do it, at least philosophically”.
PR: Right, right. So then let’s just step back for a second. When you look at Tearsheet today, I know you have a daily newsletter; we used to have a daily newsletter back in the day, but I always checked yours, and you always came out a little before mine. So I always checked yours to make sure I didn’t miss anything for the day. But what are the different components of Tearsheet today and how are you making money?
ZM: Thank you. And thank you also, like I’ve seen in your daily newsletter over the years, including some of the links to ours. I appreciate you sharing those.
PR: Sure, I like to be inclusive.
ZM: Yeah, thank you. We publish every morning at 8:15 Eastern. We have our daily reporting, which is all about the front end of the business, partnerships, technologies, marketing channels that are impacting the financial services business today. Partnerships and new product offerings are a very common theme for us. Those are types of our daily stories. We also do deeper pieces as well, like a day in the life of certain executives, getting to know them, and seeing the whole person within the industry. We’re talking about financial services, so from the incumbent side, we’re looking at the people, the technologies, and the institutions. They’re not taking revolutionary steps, they’re taking small evolutionary steps. And we’re trying to track that. And we do have a bias towards the positive. This was something that was important to me. There are plenty of stories of how these institutions don’t get it and the mistakes that they made, whether it’s an accident or whether it’s something more nefarious, but we don’t cover those stories. We’re looking at the stories of the partnerships that are working, what are the components that make that successful? Let’s unpack that and figure out how to make that work. What didn’t go right and how do you fix it? So really trying to get beyond the news into focusing on the almost like case studies of how all these things are coming into being. That’s the approach that we’ve taken more recently in our coverage is looking from a case study point of view. Can you dissect and deconstruct this partnership between these two interesting organizations, a JP Morgan Chase on one side and a fintech on the other. And what makes that really work by asking the principals on both sides, how that’s how that’s happening. So that colors our daily coverage. We have a couple of podcasts. I have my flagship Tearsheet podcast. We also are experimenting. Sarah Carey, one of our reporters, has also launched her own podcast. We try to seed our reporters and give them the opportunity to come into their own in their coverage space. Sarah writes our 10-Q newsletter for paid subscribers only, it comes out every Friday. If you’re looking at financial services as an investment universe of publicly traded stocks, she’s using that as her universe and writing stories about companies and their stocks within that. We have free daily coverage, and then we have a paid subscription. We call it Tearsheet Pro, which goes a little bit deeper into the coverage universe. Beyond that, we have that daily newsletter, as you spoke. We have a weekly newsletter that comes out on Sundays. And then we have specials. When we have a working group, we’ll try to create something like a research report that we can make available to our whole audience. So we’re trying to be thoughtful about how we create content and then spin off different forms of that to our different constituents, whether you’re a free reader or you’re a subscriber, or a paid subscriber.
PR: Right, right. And then, of course, you have the conferences, which I imagine also drive revenue.
ZM: Yes. We’ve got the paid TS Pro. That’s $50 a month. We have our conferences, which are anywhere between $500 and $1,000 to attend. We have our paid working groups. And then we have a content studio, Tearsheet Studios, which is where we make the bulk of our money. This is an in-house studio that services some of the biggest brands in the space, from Citibank to Galileo to MasterCard and Visa. We’ve worked with some of the largest companies within the financial services space. We create white papers and customized podcast series for them with Publicis Sapient, which develops apps for some of the biggest banks in the world. We launched a whole new brand for them called STEEZ, which was their Gen Z brand, which was focusing on how Gen Z and financial services intersect. We launched a new website for them. We created first-party research around that. We did a conference and calls and a newsletter around that. Within that studio we have a lot of capabilities to be able to service mostly vendors looking to reach bankers.
PR: Got it. So that’s really interesting. I always found your content interesting as, again, you really focus on something fairly specific. Like what is Citizens Bank doing in their mobile app development or what’s this partnership? So, how do you decide what to cover? What I’ve always appreciated about Tearsheet, and why I often included you guys in our newsletter, was that you were creating content that wasn’t being created anywhere else. I didn’t see it on Bloomberg. I didn’t see it in the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t see it in the myriad of other fintech newsletters. So how did you go about deciding what goes into your content?
ZM: Thank you for saying that, Peter, because that was by design. We didn’t want to be another outlet that was repurposing press releases. This is not to say we haven’t done that in our careers. We have. But in general, there’s so much news. The world is awash in news that we didn’t think we could add value there. From our vantage point, it was like, well, if you’re the head of product at Goldman Sachs’ Marcus, which is defunct now, we can talk about that. We covered that division a lot over the years.
PR: Yes.
ZM: You know, what do you need to know? What’s going to impact your thinking during the day? What kind of articles do you want to read? And we got to feel this out by talking to them a lot. We have a lot of relationships in the space. I’ve been at this, you know, I didn’t have a beard or gray hair when I started this. What matters to you? And so we would hear from them what matters to them. And a lot of what people would say, whether it was on the podcast or reading those case study articles that you’re describing, Peter, people would say when I’d meet them in conferences, “ I have that problem too.” And I love listening into, almost as a voyeur into how other companies are solving that. Cause these are very similar issues that everybody has. Like how do we innovate in a large organization that is somewhat immune to innovation and has a lot of regulatory oversight? How do you do that? How do you compete with fintechs that don’t have a Division of Innovation? You know, they innovate in their DNA. These issues that they were facing become clear when you talk to them. So, we were looking to identify the brands and the people who are really making these stories happen. You know, there are thousands of banks in the US. We try to cover the biggest ones in the sense that by speaking to them, I think if you work in a smaller bank, there are takeaways that you can apply to your organization. And it doesn’t work necessarily vice versa. That was our approach, and a lot of that had to do with our reporters and me as an editor learning what was important to our audience. So thank you for picking up on that.
PR: Yeah, I think you guys have done a great job over the years.
ZM: Thank you. By the way, it took years to get to that. I mean, you could attest to that. I’m curious to hear about you. It’s like, you know, in the first few years, it was a blog, and I had a newsletter as well as the podcast. So, Renaud Laplanche, who was just starting Lending Club, Renaud is a fantastic marketer in his own right, but he was open to meeting with new writers, and he was looking to get PR for his firm. But to break into banking, like to get Goldman Sachs or Capital One or Citi to talk to us, that literally took years and years of just showing up and publishing every day before we got our first access to an executive at those companies. How was it for you in that space, in terms of getting to the people you wanted to speak to?
PR: Well, as you say, the fintech folks were much easier because they were more open. I remember when all I had was a blog, and I went to San Francisco, where Lending Club had just moved into their new office in downtown San Francisco. And there were like 40 people there, and Renaud met with me for an hour. He showed me around. He was very gracious. And I was just this little guy with a blog, I didn’t have an event, nothing. So he was very gracious with his time, as were others in the space. The Prosper guys were just down the road and were also very gracious. Once we had an event, and we had a large-scale event, once we got to scale, which took us probably two or three years we could reach out to the Citis and JP Morgan Chases of the world and get a response. It was really after Larry Summers spoke at our event in 2015 that put us on the map. And we could say, “Here’s who spoke at our last event. We’d love to have one of your executives speak.” And so that’s how we got in the door. Without that, I think it would have been a lot harder. And then Marcus started in consumer lending and that was our gig, right? We were really deep in consumer lending. So I remember having conversations with Goldman Sachs before they launched Marcus, and they wanted to be in with us right from the get-go. So that was good. But it wasn’t easy. And I think it’s still not easy today with so many gatekeepers. Particularly the largest banks, we never got the CEOs of the largest banks. We had the CEO of every major fintech company that we wanted to speak at our events over the years but banks were just much harder. We got C-suite, but we never got CEOs of any of the big banks.
ZM: When I started Tearsheet, I told our reporters that my goal was to get Jamie Dimon on the podcast at some point. I’ve done close to 700 episodes. Jamie has not been on the podcast. I don’t know if I’ll ever get him, but I have gotten divisional CEOs at JPMorgan Chase. But you’re right, those gatekeepers are there for a reason and being able to build trust. A lot of building trust with the biggest institutions is just showing up.
PR: Yep.
ZM: And doing it day in, day out, and being there for years so that they trust that you’re going to represent your opinion faithfully and not go off on some weird thing, or they’re not going to make their people available to you. There’s sort of that push and pull. How do I keep my bones as a reporter to be able to report on what I want to report and not necessarily parrot what they’re telling me but also be able to get access? And that’s sort of the dance that’s happened over the years.
PR: Right. It is. And it also helps when you’re not looking to dig up dirt; you’re not trying to get a scoop where something bad has happened. We had a similar approach. We covered some of the negative stories, but we weren’t trying to get a scoop. When people come on my podcast, I always say that I want to position you in a positive light and your company in a positive light. It’s not a “got you” interview. I am not the New York Times or 60 Minutes or what have you. it’s not a puff piece, either. I’m trying to delve deeply, which I think you guys also do. But anyway, I want to move on because we’re running out of time here and there are so many different areas of fintech I want to talk to you about. When we started in this space, I started in the consumer lending space, really on the peer-to-peer lending side and kind of branched out from there. And I look at the space today and it’s so broad. There are so many different areas you can sink your teeth into. There are all the different payments innovations, all the different new ways banking products are distributed. There are all the different consumer acquisition tools. Then you’ve got all the fintech partnerships. You’ve got AI. You’ve got so many different parts of financial services that are being impacted by technology. I’d argue that almost no part of financial service isn’t impacted. So, when you’re looking across the broad landscape, what trends are you looking at most closely?
ZM: That’s a big question. I like how you introduced that, that there’s been no area of finance that hasn’t been impacted by technology. I remember that 2004 was my first entry into financial services. I got a job as an analyst at a hedge fund. I remember sitting next to a bond trader, and he had like four phones up to his ear at the same time and he’s scribbling on paper, and he was telephonic trading. I agree with that. The place that we always stayed very clear on was that it was never a financial services incumbent versus an upstart. It was never David versus Goliath. A lot of the mainstream media would get pulled into this. It was the upstart versus JP Morgan, a company that raised $25 million, taking on the largest bank in the world. Now we know how that ends, right? It’s unlikely that a $25 million fundraise will unseat the largest bank in the world. And so for us, we never took that us versus them or big versus small tack. The idea was that for us, for this to work, for financial services to change and evolve and be kinder, gentler, and better for everybody, it would take partnerships. I do believe one of the most encouraging things within financial services is the amount of experience that certain banks have gotten partnering with fintechs. It’s become a practice for them. And I think the ability to partner at scale will be a differentiated skill for the best institutions going forward where they will be almost like an API hub for working with some of the best fintechs out there. And to be able to do that in a way that’s both protective of the core business and also can keep up with fintechs that are, you know, watching the clock and have a burn rate that they need to manage. It’s not easy, but I do think partnerships are one of the most interesting things that happen. And a lot of times when we talk about partnerships, I always talk to my writers or journalists like, wait, is that a partnership or is that a vendor relationship? Most of the time, they’re just vendor relationships. I’m talking about partner relationships. Vendor relationships are important, too, like how to kick off a deal with a new vendor. But I’m talking about real integrations, deep integrations where you’re melding on strategies a bit. That’s most interesting to me. Obviously, open banking and open finance are really interesting. We were really early in terms of our coverage of the Plaids of this world and the piping and infrastructure that will provide for the future and be able to have some data portability and sharing there that will be essential for this industry to grow. I’m still a fan of blockchain. I’m not a huge fan of cryptocurrencies or trying to pick which one will be successful or not. But really, the underlying infrastructure, I really do view that as sort of like Internet 4.0, where it’s like the sharing of information with an associated monetary value with it. I don’t think there is a use case right now that makes sense that shows how powerful blockchain will be. But I think we will start to see that in the next few years. We’re not doing a lot of coverage of blockchain right now. It goes in this hype cycle. Unfortunately, we have gotten caught up in the hype cycle to our detriment and to our readers’ detriment. But right now, I believe the companies that are building will be the ones that are there in the future.
PR: Right, right. Well, you’re not alone there. I think everyone got caught up in it, like the time frame of 2017 and 2018 and then in 2021.
ZM: Yeah, which corresponds to rises in the asset price itself. And that gets mainstream media really excited. But to me, it’s really the infrastructure layer that’s really most interesting right now. And a lot of the stories we’re doing right now are about expanding financial services to the unbanked or underbanked. I think there’s a lot of work that’s going on there that is providing what used to be sort of captured services to an elite group of people and making those available at a price point and access to the broad swaths of people who couldn’t necessarily afford it in the past, I think that that’s really encouraging as well. So we really do believe as a stance at Tearsheet that financial services have the potential to make the world a better place if it takes that on as an ethos. So, we want to cover those companies that can do that broadly and at scale.
PR: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more there. The fintech space has done that in the last 10 years. A lot of the innovations that we’ve seen, the banks wouldn’t have done on their own.
ZM: Yeah. None of this would happen if there wasn’t a fintech industry.
PR: I still remember our 2015 event with Larry Summers as our keynote, Jamie Dimon had just written his letter a couple of weeks, a month before that event. In it, he said, Silicon Valley is coming. We were all on a high, back then, thinking we were taking their lunch. But he was right. Silicon Valley was coming. And I think we achieved many great things on behalf of consumers and small businesses. We still have a long way to go, but I think we have done a tremendous amount. Last question before I let you go. As you look ahead for Tearsheet, what is your vision? Where do you want to take this?
ZM: I think the media business is evolving. And I know you can speak to this. We’ve talked about this offline. Keeping the attention and delivering value daily to a reader isn’t trivial. And so one of the things we’ve done over the years as we’ve built our audience is decide we want to move beyond audience building and into community. Working in groups is one way to do this. Our in-person events are another way to do this. We have some other ideas you’ll hear later this year. We’re talking about getting involved in investment syndicates at this point. How do we take these executives with no dearth of things to read out there and get them involved hands-on, dealing not just with reading our stuff but having it be bidirectional, sharing what they’re working on? What are their needs, and how do we do that at a community level? Those are the things that I would love to see Tearsheet be successful at in the future. So, moving from audience to community where our readers are actively telling the future of financial services.
PR: Well, that is a great goal. Good luck with that. I think you’ve done a great job over the last decade-plus, Zack. It’s always great to chat with you, and thanks for coming on the show.
ZM: Thank you, Peter. All the best.
PR: How banks are partnering with fintech companies is the hottest topic in fintech in 2024, let’s face it. But with all the consent orders flying around, it is easy to forget that banks have been partnering with technology companies for several decades now. And there are many examples of fintech companies and banks with successful partnerships today that date back many years. There is a lot that has gone right. Let’s not forget about that. Anyway, that is it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and leave a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And thanks so much for listening.