00:05:19 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:05:19] S1: And you built, like, a payment infrastructure also. No? [00:05:23] S0: We... Well, so part of making money on the Internet involves payments. Right? So we never are like, well, let's build a payment processing company. That sounds really cool. It's actually pretty lame, I think. I I don't think that's ever what we wanted. [00:05:32] S1: Don't tell that to Stripe.
00:05:34 · Steven Schwartz
[00:05:34] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I think it doesn't really solve what matters anymore. There's so many payment processing companies. Every... There's, like, 50 different payment processing companies. And it's like, how many ways can you accept a credit card? It's like, you get it. You can accept a credit card. But because we have our goal of making people money, payments are gonna be important. And what happened was we had just grown up building all these different payment products. And before Whop, we had a little business, that wasn't really a business, it was more of a charity, we gave homeless people in New York a QR code that they could, it was laminated, had a QR code on it, and all it was was a QR code. People could scan it, and they'd pull up a profile of the the homeless person, who they are, what their background is, all that, and they could actually Apple Pay them, Venmo them, and Cash App them, and the homeless people could pick up cash from us in in Midtown. And we... We'd always been doing all these little micro payment projects, so we knew how to build payments well, and we did. And then people were like, alright, like your payments, and people love it. So that's what your question, would you build our own payment processing? Kind of. We have a bunch of embeddable components that you can use to accept payments in your website, in your iOS app, from your phone, whatever you want. And basically every single currency, and every single local payment method. You can charge people in a... If you ever been to to, like, Morocco or somewhere where it's gonna be hard to figure out how to broker deals with your cab driver, you can do that on Wab very easily.
00:07:02 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:07:02] S1: And from that, know, like payment infrastructure, most companies are trying, you know, to increase the fees and make like a huge markup on top of it. From what I've heard, you reduced the the margin a lot. Can you, like, explain, like, the reasoning behind it? [00:07:20] S0: We think that the payments piece is super commoditized, and it's like we're not trying to play a game of raising to the bottom, because, like I said, there's 50 companies that can help process payments. So for us, the faster we can get it to zero, at least that part of the business, the better. So we we are not trying to make our money from pure payment processing. That's why we have a cheapest. [00:07:44] S1: And how do you make money? [00:07:45] S0: So there's there's a lot of other things you can do on Whop and accept payments. And some of these things right now, you can can invest in in Bitcoin. You can invest in in tokenized securities. You can issue cards pretty soon. You can run ads, and we make more money on those. You can accept financing, buy now, pay later, and make more money on that. So those are... That's that's how we make money. [00:08:14] S1: And do you feel now you're more like a a global infrastructure for a business? [00:08:19] S0: I do feel like that. I feel like our number one priority right now is to make sure that we're onboarding as many businesses and platforms as we can. And through that, we we wanna focus, first and foremost, on business owners and people that have their own business.
00:08:19 · Steven Schwartz, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:08:19] S0: I do feel like that. I feel like our number one priority right now is to make sure that we're onboarding as many businesses and platforms as we can. And through that, we we wanna focus, first and foremost, on business owners and people that have their own business. [00:08:34] S1: And I think recently, you've made, like, a partnership or fundraise with Tether. [00:08:39] S0: That's right. [00:08:40] S1: Can you explain, like, why you did it, and what's the goal with it long term? [00:08:44] S0: Yeah. So Tether is the biggest stablecoin company in the world, and they basically are the predominant currency for maybe almost 10% of the entire globe. And I think they have five fifty million people a month that use Tether. So we are, a lot of ways, relevant to that, because how are people actually making the money? And if people can use Whop to make the money, and use stablecoin rails, and use Tether to facilitate transfers, and all the cool stuff that people wanna do with their money afterwards, it's a really awesome partnership. So they they agreed to invest in in Whop, and they've invested in Whop. And we are very close with their team, they're awesome awesome people. [00:09:24] S1: That's really cool. And congrats with the partnership. It's it's really inspiring. Thank you. And whenever you you want to build, like, all this functionality and features, like being able to get a credit card, etcetera, I'm assuming in The US, you have also, like, a lot of legislation. And... So how exactly do you tackle these kind of problems?
00:09:24 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:09:24] S1: That's really cool. And congrats with the partnership. It's it's really inspiring. Thank you. And whenever you you want to build, like, all this functionality and features, like being able to get a credit card, etcetera, I'm assuming in The US, you have also, like, a lot of legislation. And... So how exactly do you tackle these kind of problems? [00:09:46] S0: Yes. Totally. There's KYC. And through KYC, we make sure that we're not... We we know who is making the money, and it's not somebody in a terrorist group, for example. And there's different requirements that are mostly on anti money laundering. The government doesn't want people to be washing money and laundering their money. So they have a database that we partner up with different providers, and they check to see, okay, this person is who they say they are. They are not in a crime circle, and it's okay to send the money. So have that, so we have very good KYC and very good guardrails on who the people are. And then there's what are people actually selling. So if a quality person, you're not in a crime circle, but you're selling drugs on the platform, that needs to be off the platform, and we have a lot of monitoring and very extensive reporting around all that. And when there's bad stuff, we have to report it, those are some of the legislation I suppose around what you're asking. We take all that very seriously, and part of our responsibility in building an Internet market is to make sure everyone's safe. So we we... It's an important part of our business.
00:09:46 · Steven Schwartz, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:09:46] S0: Yes. Totally. There's KYC. And through KYC, we make sure that we're not... We we know who is making the money, and it's not somebody in a terrorist group, for example. And there's different requirements that are mostly on anti money laundering. The government doesn't want people to be washing money and laundering their money. So they have a database that we partner up with different providers, and they check to see, okay, this person is who they say they are. They are not in a crime circle, and it's okay to send the money. So have that, so we have very good KYC and very good guardrails on who the people are. And then there's what are people actually selling. So if a quality person, you're not in a crime circle, but you're selling drugs on the platform, that needs to be off the platform, and we have a lot of monitoring and very extensive reporting around all that. And when there's bad stuff, we have to report it, those are some of the legislation I suppose around what you're asking. We take all that very seriously, and part of our responsibility in building an Internet market is to make sure everyone's safe. So we we... It's an important part of our business. [00:10:58] S1: So whenever you started this, you started, like, with different partners who have, like, licenses and and are regulated to accelerate, like, the setup. Is it something long term that you want to internalize? Or do you feel like some of the features you're developing are fine with with partners?