Albert

In LA, the team went out for a night of bowling. Joey, Vadim, and Yinon dominated the scoreboards (and everyone else dominated the buffet table, instead).

Thrilled to see Albert made the list of Exceptional Startups in 2024 🎉(https://lnkd.in/gaPk6VsV) We’re in good company. Around 130 companies made the cut, based off these requirements: • At least $5m in run-rate revenue • At least 100% year over year growth, (50% minimum if revenue is above $20m) • Raised money from a specific list of venture capital firms And we’re #hiring. Learn more about working with us at albert.com/careers

Get to know the team at Albert: meet Ash, a senior operations analyst on our operations team. 1. What's your super power? I am pretty good at teaching myself useful skills. Whether it’s learning how to replace a cabin air filter, making alterations to clothing or fixing a flat tire on a bike in under 5 minutes. If something needs to get done, I’d rather learn how to do it myself before paying someone else to do it for me. You can thank my dad for that. 2. What are you working on? I recently helped with improving the account takeover process to create a better experience for users while also filling in some gaps in our existing process. I’m currently helping out with improving our Notion guide for completing Genius requests. 3. What’s your favorite restaurant or place to eat? Ok so I LOVE to eat. It’s my favorite thing to do. I love all kinds of food but lately I’ve been craving pho. My fiancé and I recently went to [Pho 87](https://pho87.site/) in Chinatown. Doesn’t look like much from the outside but the pho is DELICIOUS! If you love good pho, I highly suggest going there. Honorable mentions: DTLA KBBQ (Chinatown) and Himalayan Cafe (Old town Pasadena). 4. If you could only read 1 book for the rest of your life, which book would you choose? If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, it would be "Convenience Store Woman by Sahara Murata". It’s about a woman who struggles with the pressure from friends/family to conform to societal standards (i.e. build a career, find a husband and start a family) despite her being content as a single woman working at a convenience store in Japan. It really makes you reflect on what exactly makes you happy in this life. 5. What do you like most about working at Albert? What I like most about Albert is that working here has given me the opportunity to learn many different skills, from having a hand in building the foundation for the Genius team to creating ads and analyzing data for marketing to now helping to improve some of the processes we have in place for banking operations. I’ve never worked somewhere that has given me the chance to explore my different interests and build my skills set like Albert has.

The New York team got creative and attended a private pottery class while listening to Unchained Melody on repeat for 2 hours. Only one of those things is true.

The One Page Budget. Many things contributed to Albert’s path from cash burn to profit, but none more than simplifying the company’s budget to fit on one sheet of paper. Here’s how we did it: https://fnd.news/47DQt7C Charline Munger quipped, “I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word bullshit earnings.” Like many companies did when capital was cheap, we confused ourselves with second-order metrics: the lifetime value of our customer was high so it was okay to lose money today; we're spending 50% of revenue on people because we're investing in the future; our adjusted EBITDA margin isn't terrible; and so on. We burned a lot of money believing this story. When we turned focus to profit, we leaned into our best skill as product builders: simplifying things. We built a budget—covering our entire complex business—to fit on a single 100 row spreadsheet. In your personal budget, you know things are good when cash goes up, and that you have a problem when cash goes down. Businesses benefit from this simple thinking too. To free ourselves from jargon at Albert, we now run core business strategy from our single page budget. Two years ago, we started a quarterly leadership meeting called the "Cash Flow Session." Each quarter, the leadership team, who has full access to company financials, brainstorms ways to increase cash flow. Sitting in a room together with a white board, thinking of ways to save money, always makes money. We relearned a lesson Munger preached for nearly a century: first, focus on making money. Read the whole story at the link above.

Get to know the team at Albert: meet Adam, a staff software engineer on the platform engineering team. 1. What's your super power? Remembering song lyrics. 2. What are you working on? My main focus right now is on upgrading all of Albert’s databases. 3. What’s your favorite restaurant or place to eat? DuckDuck Goat in the Westloop of Chicago. 4. If you won the lottery, what would be your most frivolous purchase? Probably a personal chef.

In August 2017, Albert ran out of cash. We had 50k devoted users, but Albert was free, so we lost money. Here’s the story of how we went from free to paid, and how it completely changed our trajectory: https://fnd.news/3tsHfNl In early August 2017, after one last unsuccessful fundraising attempt, we had one option left: ask customers to pay. We needed to be sure that customers loved the product enough to pay for it long-term, so we asked every user to pay what *they* thought was fair. We showed a slider ranging from $0 to $14 a month, and the user could pick any value. On the morning of August 11, 2017, we launched the slider. Over half of our users voluntarily chose to pay more than $0, averaging $4 per month. Albert went from $0 to $1 million in annual recurring revenue almost overnight. We had almost missed the most obvious way to build a sustainable business: charging the customer. On this journey, we've learned three important principles to building a successful paid product: 1. Bundling. Charge less for the entire service than the total cost of all individual features bought separately elsewhere. This has worked well for Albert. 2. Clear pricing. Customers want to know what a service truly costs them. 3. Onboarding friction. One of the most unintuitive things about charging customers is that the added friction is a good thing. When a customer makes a decision to pay for a service, even if for a free trial, they're committing to investing enough time in the service to find out if they will use it. In fact, this principle is so powerful—albeit counterintuitive—that Albert's onboarding flow is over 50 screens! Millions of people have completed this flow. By the end of the onboarding flow, we know if we have a dedicated customer and the customer knows if they want to dedicate themselves to the product. A win for both sides. Charging customers brings focus. Removing "free" brings clear focus across a company. Everyone at the company knows who to serve, who to support, and who to build for. Costs are aligned with revenue. Perhaps most important is the clear message to the customer: vote with your wallet. If you don't like the product enough to pay for it, you'll leave. The company knows that it must always deliver a great product, because mediocrity will be punished with churn and lost revenue.

Our NYC team got together for one last happy hour before Thanksgiving to ”give thanks” for good times with good people.

The LA office hosted their annual Volunteer Power Hour in support of PATH, a non-profit organization on a mission to end homelessness. Our team sorted supplies and packed 80 care kits to be distributed to the homeless. Half of the kits were packed with hygiene essentials while the other half were stuffed with snacks and winter goods such as hand warmers, hot cocoa, and socks.

Meetings are toxic. They drive low morale and a feeling of running in place. Pageantry over progress. Here’s a fresh approach to scheduling and maximizing work: https://fnd.news/3RucPno I recently heard a story from a friend of someone who won a charity auction for dinner with Warren Buffett. Trying to schedule with Warren, he suggested that his assistant find time that worked for both of them. On the spot, Warren offered dinner the next evening. Warren Buffet, famous investor and CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world, keeps his calendar open. He focuses on his work above all else. In every organization, there are two forces: acceleration and deceleration. One group of people focuses on building; the other slows things down with process. Organizations overrepresented by decelerators stagnate. One company activity disproportionately drives deceleration: *meeting*. Meetings corrode teams. Below are a set of principles for thinking about the impact and cost of meetings: 1. Double time to measure true cost: A standalone half hour meeting actually costs a full hour because the meeting will likely start and end late, and you have to switch contexts before and after. 2. Meeting is not working: No work is done during a meeting. 3. Schedule matters: Three back to back to back 30 minute meetings cost a fraction of three standalone 30 minute meetings spread throughout the day. 4. Recurring meetings are toxic: If you find yourself in more than one or two recurring meetings a week, you must change course. Unless there's an acute issue to solve, let people work. 5. Over-meeting drives deceleration: People meeting the most are most likely the ones decelerating an organization. Over a nearly a decade of building and running Albert, I've developed a schedule that works. Click on the link above for my actual calendar to see how it works.