Aaron Bai & Sahil Phadnis are two ambitious young college dropouts who recently raised a $6.2M seed round to build Pebble — a next-generation neobank, powered by blockchain technology.

They are by far the youngest founders we’ve had on the show - they dropped out from UC Berkeley in their freshman year (at ages 17 & 19 respectively).

Whereas incumbents like Bank of America & Chase offer around 0.04% APY, Pebble is able to offer 5% weekly APY rewards (100X difference) by leveraging blockchain technology in the backend. How? Listen to the episode to learn more.

In this episode, Akkshay chats with them about strategies, tactics, and hacks that they’ve used to build their startup. They discuss product, distribution, fundraising, tokenomics, and much more. Here are some of the questions we cover:

• Product: What was your process for building conviction in this problem before pursuing it?
  
• Distribution: What’s your current acquisition strategy?
  
• Fundraising: What is 1 unconventional fundraising tip that you have for founders? Something unique that you think other founders on the pod may not have already said.

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Host: Akkshay Khoslaa

Writing & Production: Akkshay Khoslaa & Gokul Kumarresen