The following interview is a conversation we had with Stephany Kirkpatrick, CEO and Founder of Orum, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $85 Million Raised to Build an API integration for Instant Payouts.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Hi. It’s exciting to be on today’s show. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Sure. I mean, sometimes I feel like the answer to this question is not that interesting since I’m a 40 year old mom these days who lives in the suburbs of New York. But I think if you get into my background, I am the daughter of an immigrant who I think having a dad who didn’t grow up in the US. Really shaped so much about my life. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I love the outdoors, and so every winter right now, I find myself in New York, craving being out west. So I love all things sunshine, hiking. I have two young little girls, second grader in Kindergartner and a company called Orum that I’m really excited about. So lots going on these days.
Brett
Nice. I know we’re going to dive into that here shortly, but two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I mean, I admire so many CEOs that it’s hard to pin down, like, one or two. But I think if I have to really be pressed, I would go with the path of a Founder who today feels like he’s a long way from the very beginning of the story. But when I think about Brian Chesky, who’s been building airbnb since he was very young, I think there are so many things about the Founder journey that you don’t know till you live it. And as somebody who’s living it in their 40s versus their early twenty s, I can really just respect and empathize in a totally different way with folks who do it early in life, right. When their networks aren’t as big, when they haven’t been in the workforce for as long. And I think as a CEO, he’s done an incredible job of not only being a visionary and truly optimizing something that now I prefer airbnb over hotels, but also dealing with this ultra complex regulatory component.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Not even state. By state, which is, like how a lot of regulated companies have to do it, but like, municipality by municipality and still overcoming the odds and building something so flawless and beautiful that consistently meets the demand of the customer and has constantly grown in various ways to support a thriving and evolving point of view on travel, staying with others, et cetera. So, I don’t know, every time I think about amazing CEOs building cool things, I come back to him and Airbnb a lot.
Brett
Yeah, that’s such a great call out. It’s so interesting how Uber and Travis Kalanick and the old Uber team, how they handled the regulatory environment compared to Airbnb and Brian Shesky. I feel like it was a very similar situation, right, where the laws were really against them. I think in Uber’s case, they just bulldozed and steamrolled through them. But Brian seems to have taken a much more diplomatic approach, and it’s obviously worked very well for them. So really interesting entrepreneur, agree. Now, let’s talk books. Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be one of those classic business books, or it can just be a book that shaped how you personally view the world.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I’m glad you asked me about books, because I read far more than any other kind of content I consume. Although I’m definitely on the podcast train these days, and I read a ton of things. Like, I love fiction. I think reading for me, is an escape. It’s a release, and it’s a creative outlet. So I do read business books, but I say I read them less often. So if I’m being honest here, a lot of my library is just, like, really good fiction. But from a business management perspective, there’s a few I could give that I think are, like, off the shelf good ones that probably lots of people have read. The hard thing about Hard Things is a great example. And the Lean Startup, I think both give you perspective on just company building. But what’s been really foundational for me as a Founder and CEO is the book essentialism, and I think is just part of my DNA already to have kind of an essentialist lifestyle.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
But it’s really the disciplined pursuit of less. And I think as a Founder, you have this sort of challenge that you’re facing, which is that previously the way you rose the reins and did good work was to just do more work, right? Say yes to every opportunity, lean in, tackle more, spend another hour on email. And as a Founder, actually, you really can’t do that. And so I have to be challenging myself. And frankly, I challenge my team, too, to thinking about getting the right things done at the right time. So it’s not doing more with less. It’s not doing more faster. It’s literally doing less, but doing more of the right things. And that is, I think, a mindset shift that has really shaped both who I’m becoming, because I think it is a journey. It’s not a finite one as a leader, but also just how I plan the limited amount of time I have every day to apply myself in the places where I can create the most leverage for the business and then ask my team to do the same thing.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Because there are certain people that are capable of lots of things, I’m capable of doing tons of things, but where I am most essential, that is something that you really have to sit down and think about, and I use it in my personal life, too. There are so many things you could be spending time on. What are the essential ones? What gives you joy? What creates leverage? What makes you happy? What fulfills you? And so for me, that’s been probably one of the most powerful books that I’ve discovered and I recommend to everybody.
Brett
Yeah, that’s one of my, I would say, top ten favorite books. And then there’s another one from I always get his name wrong, but I think it’s Greg McCohen. There’s another one from that same author called Effortless, which is really good, and we made that one of our company core values, and we have everyone in the company read that and it’s to make work Effortless. So we put a huge emphasis on that. And I think there’s just a lot of valuable lessons from both books and really just the philosophy that he preaches overall. It’s just very valuable insights and very good lessons there.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I’m totally aligned with Effortless as well. So we must share the same top ten list somewhere.
Brett
Yeah, I’m sure we do. Now let’s talk about fiction books for a little bit here because I’m trying to read more fiction, especially at night, to kind of, as you mentioned, escape and calm my brain down. So is there a specific fiction book or series that you really have enjoyed reading?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Oh, boy. One that I didn’t know you were going to ask me about, but of course I opened the door to you. I mean, classically anything, mystery, thriller, CIA, because of course, when I was a kid, I was going to be a CIA agent. Obviously, anything sort of in that genre is always exciting for me. But recently I have also found I’m kind of hooked on young adult books. I know there’s something about going back to angsty love stories and just a time in your life that you can never relive, but when you read about it, you sort of internalize. So I think, Categorically, those are two areas that are my favorite most recent read I finished a book called Confess by Colleen Hoover. Might not be up your alley, Brett, but it’s definitely a fun read and got some twists and turns in it that weren’t expected.
Brett
Nice. Well, I’ll have to check that out. Now, let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about the company. So take us back to the early days in the origin story.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
So as a financial planner, I spent my formative years figuring out how to give financial advice to other people. And the skill of giving financial advice is it’s not one to one, but it’s not one to 200 million, right? So I started building technology when I was fairly young. And through that journey, I started to realize, one, I loved building things. There is a better way to build something. You don’t have to just go with the status quo. And two, I realized that there was a way to have more impact. Right. As I mentioned, my dad was not born in the US, came as an immigrant, grew up with very little. And I’ve always been intrigued by, one, closing the wealth gap and really helping people who have less figure out how they can apply dollars to have more, and two, thinking about the time to money problem, right?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
And if you think about breaking that down, how often you get paid, how fast you can get money from account A to account B. If you save money in a bank account and want to move it to checking, how long is it going to take? I’m owed a claim from an insurance provider, it’s going to be mailed by check. All of those things represent the time to money problem, which is why it ultimately becomes really interesting for me. Fast forward to where we are today to be solving payments infrastructure. But from financial planner building software to then going into my tech career, I started to really see that you could give great financial advice, but you were always going to have people who didn’t want to follow that advice because they were afraid that they couldn’t access their money in those just in case moments.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
And I saw that at scale when I was working in the earliest days at LearnVest, a startup that I was at previously, where we ended up getting to 100,000 people, but I wanted to reach more households. And then we sold that business to Northwestern Mutual. And I spent an amazing three years running a post murder integration and seeing that technology now touch six and a half million households. And I said, that’s still not enough. So I want to be at the intersection of innovating around the actual infrastructure that can touch 250,000,000 American households and wallets so that when we think about time to money, the question isn’t how long will it take? Then you can start innovating around wholly different financial services products that don’t rely on three to five day settlement windows and weeks to receive reimbursements or funds distribution. And actually to be provocative, if what we’re building at Orum had existed a decade ago, you would have never built Venmo, which is probably one of the most ubiquitous financial services products we all consume.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
So that leads us up to talking obviously about what is Orum. But I think in that journey, when I think about this consistent interest in figuring out, can we build infrastructure so that the future of financial services looks wholly different, I think it’s about building a world in which everyone has the freedom to build to their potential. And we aren’t constrained by socioeconomic status because the ability to save and best receive funds is all really uniformly managed regardless of income level. And so that’s why kind of my background as a financial planner ultimately leads to me now, say, being a payments.
Brett
Nerd working on infrastructure that makes a lot of sense and super interesting. And who are the customers then? It looks like it’s consumer lending platforms, gig platforms, crypto platforms. Do I have that right?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
You’ve got it. So you’re hired in sales, effective immediately. And Orum is really the simplest API integration for instant payouts. And so when you think about time to money, paying out funds instantly is absolutely the job to be done. So with us, via our one single solution API, you can deliver Payouts across RTP, which is the real time payment network. ACH. Sameday ACH and more. We’re super excited to be launched partners with Fed now, which is going to be yet another real time growth settlement framework that comes at the back half of this year. And what that allows us to do with our business partners, who can be serving either consumers or businesses themselves, is to implement Instant Payouts in a tech stack, literally in less than a sprint. We have people who have done it anywhere from three to seven days through a single easy to use API.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
And then underneath that, you access all the major bank rails without costly bank integration. This is where you’re saving two years in time to market $2 million of operating costs, and there’s no prolonged compliance or overhead that you have to maintain. And you get a team of experts, right? Folks on our team came from the best in the business stripe square Klarna marketa. And then they also come from places like bank of New York Mellon, where for 150 years, payments have been the backbone of the business. That then allows us to launch new Payout experiences with our customers so that they can attract new customers to their platforms, and ultimately, through that differentiation, not only grow, but provide diversified revenue opportunities where they can monetize faster payments and experiences that they build around instant. And then we grow beyond that Payout solution. So the goal is to really help companies thrive in a world of real time expectations.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I laugh and say this all the time, but it’s true. You’re in San Francisco? I’m in New York right now. We could get a massage on demand in our houses in under an hour if we wanted to get our money from point A to point B. We’re talking about five to seven days without a product like what Oram has. So this is so much about just growing beyond and thinking about this truly real time experience that’s now the expectation.
Brett
Yeah, anytime I’m using a platform and I have to wait days for a payment, it just always has blown my mind that it really seems like it hasn’t gotten any better in the last ten years, which is just crazy. With all the money that’s flowed into companies that are trying to solve this.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
It seems I mean, the most innovative thing to happen is you could go to the ATM and get your own money on a Saturday, and that’s not very innovative if you think about it.
Brett
Yeah, for sure.
Brett
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Brett
Now, if we look at the competitive landscape, are there organizations or more startups that you’re competing with? Or are you really just competing against these companies building it themselves?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
It’s a really interesting prompt because as I mentioned at the top of the conversation, companies like Airbnb, which are just world class technology products, they ultimately had to build massive payment teams. Uber. Right. These guys all have hundreds of people working on figuring out how to make money, move in the right way, and they do that all in house. It’s very expensive. The alternative to that, and I think where we find ourselves today, is that you’re going to build a product, whatever it may be, and accepting payment or issuing payment is probably important, but it’s not as important as all the other core value props and features. So how can you work with a partner like Orum, where it’s straightforward and simple. You get the expertise and the access, and you can then apply your resources, really to what matters to your business around customer growth, customer features.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
And so from a competitive landscape perspective, absolutely. You could go pick a bank. We did not invent real time payments. We just happened to make it easy to get it. What you can’t get from banks and other providers is something that we do pretty uniquely, just like Amazon, we essentially do optimization and orchestration. So think about all the different ways you could move money. Right. RTP, Fed, now ACH, same day sh wires, push, giselle, push to PayPal, Venmo. Oh, my God. It’s just endless. So in the same way that Amazon is like, well, there’s FedEx, Ups, Postal service, do you really care that the package came via which provider? No, you definitely care how fast it comes. That’s how people think about bank transfers. So a lot of what we do is at the intersection of the intelligence of how should a payment route, and that’s looking at speed, risk, cost, and then actually executing that transfer.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
So it’s a whole lot more than just accessing the money movement itself. It’s really the framework to be able to build world class payout solutions and to do that with a team of experts who’ve already optimized the hardest part so that you can go back to building essentially core products.
Brett
And is there a blockchain element here? I feel like I’ve heard this problem talked about many times as a possible use case for what blockchain technology can do. But I don’t know if those use cases have really lived up to the hype. So is there any blockchain here?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Not today. Although blockchain is interesting for so many reasons, I’m not sure that in what we’re doing now, we would consider it a must have. I think it’s sometimes like a problem looking for a solution. But I do think that down the road there may be things we’ll do with our data network, there may be things that we do future state where an Immutable contract or record becomes relevant. But today our event based system is built on go on the back end. And no blockchain over here. At least not yet.
Brett
Got it. Now can you talk to us about traction and adoption and just any growth metrics that you can share that demonstrate the growth that you’re seeing?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
This has been such a fun thing to get to talk about because Payments is an actually really different kind of business. I think as a Founder, when you set out on your journey to build a company, I’ll turn it on, people will buy it, right? Absolutely, they do. What I think is what’s really been interesting is Payments is actually a very deep form of innovation. And so as we’ve been able to help figure out how to help our customers optimize what they’re building, the growth trajectory of how we sit alongside our customers and help them actually grow their core business is really a feedback loop into our growth. So we spend a lot of time making sure that people know not just under the right kind of instant payout feature, but how to truly optimize it. So we’ll do marketing campaigns together, we’ll do webinars so that their customers can understand features.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Really just sitting alongside customers and seeing that it’s not just about plugging in, but making sure you’ve plugged it in the right spot, you’re using it. And that the use of it is driving growth from the very beginning. First of all, we spent a lot of time in stealth mode. So our private beta came out at the beginning of last year and that allowed us to really cultivate a very strong platform. And now we’re in a position to work with anybody from some of the largest financial services providers. Think like Fidelity, e Money, the biggest bank in the world is a partner of ours, all the way down to some of the most innovative gaming, crypto, new services platforms that are popping up. We really sit across a ton of verticals, right. The brokerage crypto, the creator economy is a huge space for us. We love earned wage access, factor in logistics, gambling, gig economy, insurer tech, I could name a bunch of them because these are all places where time to money is a huge problem.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
So we have a barbell strategy that says, hey, if we take on enough bigger, larger fi, we can also take on all the small brand new innovative things. And some of those things will work out and some of them won’t. But we want to be always that first phone call that you make when you’re thinking about building a company and you know you’re going to do payouts or you’re going to do money movement because everything else that you’re building should go faster as a result of working with a partner like Orum. It’s been super fun to watch the charts that we track every week break. We probably had to pivot how we track them in our audience meetings and to really just watch penny by penny, transaction by transaction a payments business really come to life. I’m super excited about where we are today.
Brett
Wow. Super cool. Now I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about funding. So at the start of the call I’d mentioned 85 million in funding. And what I want to talk about specifically is the fact that you’re obviously female Founder here. And I was reading the depressing news, I think it was last month in TechCrunch that women founded startups raised less than 2% of VC funds in 2022. So what’s going on here? I feel like there was a lot of awareness raised around this major problem a few years ago. And just from reading the data or looking at the data, it seems like there’s been practically no progress made. Is that a fair assessment and what can we do to solve this problem and actually address this problem and see that number dramatically increase?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I think it’s a fair assessment that it probably hasn’t gotten dramatically better overnight. And I think there’s I have a point of view. I don’t know if it’s right. I think there’s a reason why that’s true. Certainly intent is higher. Absolutely. There are funds that have now been allocated just to go after either female or female and other areas of underrepresented founders. But I think the reality is, Brett, if you think about venture funding, it’s tech companies, right? And who starts a tech company? Well, anomaly people like me who have literally no technical experience that had never written a line of code. And there’s a few of us that do that. Most people who start tech companies are technical. They’re previously engineers or product people or both, and they have a lot of technical knowledge. So I think that in order to really fuel a more impactful change, it’s not just setting aside dollars with intention to find female founders.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
It’s actually starting at a much more granular level of who at the elementary school education level might be exposed to Stem, might be exposed to computer science, to know that’s a pathway. Very few women get degrees in computer science, and as a result, very few women are engineers. And as a result of that, my hypothesis is that very few women go out to found companies that are technical. That isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of female entrepreneurs. There absolutely are. Many of them are not building tech companies, which is why you don’t see them in the venture funding landscape. And I think it’s cyclically, driven by a supply problem that won’t be rectified overnight, but could be a place of really interesting investment. And that’s what gets me ultimately excited about some of the boards I sit on and things I do in my not so spare time.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Because I think that’s where we actually have the ability to create a generational change, where women grow up exposed to the sciences and exposed to computers and exposed to technology, and thus they’re in a position to be part of the funding environment as we continue to progress.
Brett
Yeah, I love that. It sounds like we’re really getting into the root cause of the issue or going further upstream, as opposed to just focusing on, okay, let’s make sure Venture Fund raises 50 million and they’re just going to focus on backing female founders. It seems like that’s not going to really move the needle, but if you go downstream or upstream, whichever way it would be, and focus on the younger children, I think you can really move the needle and have an impact.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
That’s exactly how I see it. So I don’t know if I’m right or wrong, but that’s where I like to spend some time, just getting involved in local Stem programs and pushing the thought leadership that’s out there to not only make investments in founders, but to make investments in programs that can create opportunities for founders in the future.
Brett
Nice. I love that. Now, let’s talk a little bit about market categories. So how do you think about your market category and do you view this as a new category that’s going to be created or is this part of that existing payments infrastructure category?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
We definitely find ourselves, I think, sitting at the intersection of payments infrastructure and just infrastructure broadly for financial services because our jobs won’t be done just by building instant payouts. Right. That’s a starting point for a much bigger vision in which we fundamentally rewrite the entire infrastructure layer. So I think it’s probably appropriate that’s where you see us today. But we really feel like we’re enablers of what will become net new categories of innovation and infrastructure that goes beyond just the payments piece. I think the intrigue for me of thinking about today to accept a payment, the US has a very specific framework for that, but what would that look like in the future? And what role does identity and fraud and thus data around those two vectors play in ultimately optimizing both payments and financial services in the future? So a lot more to come from us as we continue to grow our ten year vision.
Brett
Nice. And we’re going to talk about the vision here in a second, but a few other quick questions. So let’s talk about go to market challenges. I’m sure so far you’ve probably experienced a couple of them. If we had to choose one major go to market challenge that you faced and overcame, what’s the challenge and how’d you overcome it?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Man, there are so many hard things and as founders, I think you’re compelled to tell these stories of like, look, it worked, instead of talking to your point about what were the challenges. And I think one of the very first challenges was setting out to build a money movement product and go to market on it before it was done. Because theoretically, right, like, you want to build a waitlist. And that’s how consumer products work. And I think the flaw in that is that people don’t want to switch money movement providers when it’s not complete. People don’t necessarily believe that you’re going to have something unique and better and differentiated until they can experience it and run a payment on it. I think initially it was really interesting for me, who exclusively has a consumer background in tech, to go, oh, this concept of a waitlist, maybe it works for SaaS products, but it doesn’t necessarily work in Payments because you have to have a complete thing.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
And I think the other AHA is that the completeness of that thing in Payments, we might apply the Minimum Viable Product MVP concept to it, meaning it doesn’t have parity with a bank, for example, but it’s also not supposed to, but it also can’t stop functioning. And so you have quite a bit to build. And so making sure that when you’re in your go to market, you’re able to compel customers to really see and understand some of the lesser known pieces we’ve really iterated through. How do we do demos? Like it’s an API, what do you want me to show you? What we’ve learned is that if you build a demo that shows the customer experience from an app perspective or a business user perspective, people go, oh, I get it, so it’s finding your way. And for me, B2B sales and B2B go to market felt so different and foreign from what I was used to on the consumer side that there were definitely lots of reps of learnings.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Even recently, I. Would say we’ve learned a lot about how we, one, we’re structuring pricing, and two, how were positioning it. They’re two different things. And so as we started to find out that there was more we needed to do to create flexible pricing, I think that’s been just one of those iterations that you have in your go to market journey that continues to teach you how to adapt to the needs of the market that you’re spending time in. So those are some good ones. I could probably talk for a whole podcast about the mistakes that had been made and the learnings that you have, which is just, I think, part of the journey and, frankly, part of the fun.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Now, let’s wrap here with a question about the vision. So you had mentioned ten year vision. I’m not going to push you to go that far. We can go as far as you want, but what’s the vision for the company? What does this look like 3510 years from now?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Our vision is to power a better financial system where everyone has the freedom to build to their potential. And we think that we’re building the scaffolding required to rethink today’s existing constraints and empower real change in the way that financial system works. We want to embolden both our B2B partners and their users, consumers and businesses with solutions that inspire new habits and possibilities. It’s a whole new frontier when you stop having to ask how or how fast to move money. And then, in terms of building to their potential, we help our clients and their users take action toward their ambition by empowering both immediate and long term opportunities, financially and otherwise. And just as I step back and look at the kinds of companies that we’ve been able to help bring to life today that are wholly new segments of financial services, as we look out to that ten year vision, and we build a future clearinghouse a new data network, an inclusive framework in financial services.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I think the opportunity for us to go from what we are today, which is the simplest API integration for instant payouts, to an entire ecosystem, is what just gets me out of bed and supercharges me even on the busiest days to really keep that vision top of mind and be thinking about where we’re going to end up five to ten years from now.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Stephanie, I’d love to keep you on here and ask you another 30 or 40 questions, but we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap and save that for part two. But before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Stephany Kirkpatrick
I mean, supposedly, I should say Twitter here because that’s where everybody in Fintech hangs out, but really, I think the best place to find us is hello at orum.io we’d love to have a conversation. Whether you’re thinking today about instant payouts or money movement, come chat with us.
Brett
Amazing. Stephanie, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about what you’re building. This has been a blast, and look forward to having you back on in a couple of years.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
Likewise. Thanks, Brett.
Brett
All right, take care.
Brett
You.
Stephany Kirkpatrick
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