Scaling Finance From Startup To IPO with Wealthfront's Alan Imberman

Sasha Pilch is joined by Alan Imberman, CFO at Wealthfront, to talk about what it really takes to scale a modern fintech from early scrappiness to a successful IPO, without losing the product instincts that got you there.

The conversation starts with the finance leadership side: how the finance function changes across stages, why audits and regulation create discipline, and what the public-company jump demands behind the scenes, from bank selection to testing-the-waters meetings to the S-1 feedback loop. Alan shares what the “ring the bell” moment hides, and why telling the business story clearly becomes a core part of the job.

We also cover custodial accounts and tax gain harvesting, plus the early push into a mobile-first mortgage and refinancing product. Finally, we look at AI financial advice, LLM referrals, and how conversational AI could reshape client education and service.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Alan Imberman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-imberman-cfa-aab2371/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything again.

Transcript

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Welcome And Alan’s Wealthfront Journey

Sasha Pilch 1:43

Hello and welcome to the listeners of the This Month InfinTech podcast. I'm so glad that you can join us today, and I'm delighted to interview our guest, Alan Imberman, CFO at Wealthfront. Hi, Alan. It's great to have you on the podcast. How are you today?

Alan Imberman 1:57

Good, Sasha. Thank you for uh having me.

Sasha Pilch 1:59

Yeah, thanks for coming. And where are you calling from today?

Alan Imberman 2:02

I'm in Dallas, Texas. I uh grew up in Dallas. I moved to Wellfront, uh or sorry, to California for Wellfront um in 20, like the end of 2015, 2016. And then like many others during COVID, I kind of uh scattered back around to familiar uh places and so I'm back in Dallas now.

Sasha Pilch 2:23

Oh lovely. Um speaking of like those early days of Wealthfront, I actually started interacting with you guys back in 2017. Wealthfront and Betterment were two of our biggest clients when I was at Quovo. So it's been absolutely incredible to watch your success since then. And so you've been at Wealthfront since 2015, you became the CFO in 2021. You've literally seen the company go from a venture-backed startup all the way to public markets debut. So, what's the biggest mental shift in how you think about the finance function across those stages?

Building A Lean Finance Function

Alan Imberman 3:05

Yeah, uh that's a good question because it's really changed a lot. Um, when I started in 2015, I was one of the first hires for the then CFO. And we had two people doing finance accounting, equity administration, tax, all of these things. We would obviously use um some third parties as necessary to help us, but you know, today that team of two is 19 going on 20. Uh, and we've obviously added investor relations to the mix. We have tax now in-house, we do risk and control. So uh obviously things have matured. But you know, right when I started, uh, we actually uh hired Ernst ⁇ Young to start doing the audits for our parent corporation, which is the public company now. We had always been doing audits for our broker dealer um as that's a requirement annually. And so um it's always brought a lot of discipline to our business uh being regulated. Uh and um so I think that, you know, early in those days, right, we were, you know, it was like called a cash burn report. Uh, you know, now it's a cash flow uh statement, and we're we're generating cash flow, so that's obviously a big difference for us. Um I think that, you know, I was working every day and night doing accounts payable to, you know, the cash burn report to the financial model, and now we have other people helping doing a much better job than I was doing on it. So uh it's actually quite um nostalgic, even though it was only 10 years ago, thinking about those Saturdays of you looking in the AP inbox and then manually doing things in one system and then going to the other system. And uh so now that's all kind of automated and much better. So um things have changed quite a bit, but um, you know, I still think that we are still pretty scrappy for a public company with you know the size we are to have 19 people across six different kind of subfunctions within the the area. Um so that's something I think will always be a part of our business model.

Sasha Pilch 5:06

Yeah, always like a lean, effective team. And hearing you talk about doing all the functions and working on Saturdays, what was it like years later when you had that monumental moment in December of last year

The Real Work Behind An IPO

Sasha Pilch 5:22

when you IPO'd? Like what was the lead up like? Did you ring the bell?

Alan Imberman 5:26

Yeah, though that's interesting. Uh so I did was right next to David, our CEO, when he pushed the button or rang the bell at the NASDAQ. Uh my kids actually were on the podium in the very front, and my wife was there uh as well. So it was a really special moment because they were very much a part of uh of it given as much uh really of uh the support they provided so that I could uh you know work. Uh especially, I mean, to your point, the lead up, right? I mean, the ringing the bell is what everybody sees, but you know, we had to have a bake-off, and then from the bake-off, you do the testing the waters meetings where you go meet with investors several times. Uh, there's obviously the SEC feedback on the S1, because I think we did our confidential filing in June, so it was like a six-month process. The government shut down in October when we were about to go, actually. Um, and so then when the government reopened, it was you know, December is not a great time uh historically for companies to go public. It's possible. Um, but we had a very good opportunity. The investors were very receptive, and so we decided to go. But um, there's a lot of work that goes in drafting the S1 with the investment bank. So the lead up is um uh it's a lot of work, but it's it's fulfilling. It's always fun to tell your story in that way, uh, both uh on narrative in the S One and the Roadshow video, uh, the investor presentations, um, and then uh obviously uh the day of when you're at the NASDAQ and waiting for the first trade and and all that. It's a lot of fun. Um I don't know if I would do it again. Uh I know we had just enough uh there are people who do it multiple times, and God bless them. Uh, but that that was uh that's a lot of work.

Sasha Pilch 7:12

Congratulations. It's it's so incredible. And it's going well. Wellfront reported a record annual revenue of $365 million for fiscal year 2026, up 18% year on year. How much of that growth do you attribute to being a newly public company versus the underlying business momentum that was already there pre-IPO?

Growth Drivers Beyond Going Public

Alan Imberman 7:35

Yeah, that particular growth, uh, because our fiscal year ends Jan 31, so that would have been Jan 31, 26 um that year end, and so we wouldn't have been public very long. That that particular growth was actually uh years of investment um in product and and features. Um, you know, namely the cash account. Uh so we have a cash management account um that today pays a base rate of 3.3%. You can get various uh incentives if you do direct deposit or if you refer somebody or your new client. Uh, there are ways to earn over 4%. Um and we've put a lot of investment in that um and we continue to build it out as a kind of fully functioned uh checking-like account. Um we're not a bank, but we do keep people's money at uh bank partners where they earn interest that's FDIC insured. Um and so while rates went to zero, uh nobody was really interested in you know in earning interest on cash. Uh, we continued building out the checking in the debit card and uh instant transfers and wires. And so a lot of that investment at a time where it was non-consensus to be building that because everybody wanted meme stocks and crypto and all these other things ended up paying off big for us over the last kind of three to four years. And that's um, you know, something that can be seen if you look at our cash management account. I think we reported something close to $45 billion on the end of May in cash management alone, 99 billion total uh client assets across cash and investing. And that's a much larger amount than companies that are you know 10, 15 times our size in terms of clients. Uh, and that's because I think one, our clients trust us to keep their money, and then two, just the investment we've made to really of another account on the market where you can do all of the checking-like features uh and earn the rate of interest of a high-yield savings, and that is you know, requires a lot of integration with different partners and something we invested in to achieve that growth. What we have seen post-IPO is a lot of um, I think, client growth this year in periods that would have been seasonally slower. And I think that's somewhat to the awareness of the IPO as well as uh David, our CEO, mentioned on our last earnings call, large language models have actually been um referring us more uh in the newer models that the AI frontier companies have released. When people are asking financial advice and what they should do with the money, we're we're seeing that we're getting a lot of referrals from them. And that's probably uh partly because we you know uh offer the right way to invest and save, and partly because we're there's we're more aware now that we're a public company.

Sasha Pilch 10:31

So if people are asking chat or Claude, like where should I put my money? You guys are coming up top of GEO type searches because you are the

Instant Withdrawals And Customer Trust

Sasha Pilch 10:41

best in market in terms of tech forward, customer-centric.

Alan Imberman 10:46

Exactly.

Sasha Pilch 10:47

One of the things that I've heard you talk about before, which is doing right by the customer, then resulting in your huge growth. For example, Wealthfront allows customers to take money whenever they want. And other institutions that are more legacy make it really hard. You've got to fill out a form and no one wants to do it. Um it's quite counterintuitive that you're giving people access to their money immediately, which then in turn results in them giving you more of their money.

Alan Imberman 11:17

So Yeah, that's right. Yeah, this um this came about when we were working on um when RTP uh real-time payments and Fed now was becoming more popular. Um, many of the banks and the partners we went to talk to about instant withdrawals using RTP uh were not working on that. They were working on instant deposit. How come we get the money in right away? But they weren't working on the withdrawal side, and they were quite surprised that that is what we were focused on. Uh but as I mentioned, you know, that was part of the reason for our growth. You know, we had always paid this high rate of interest, and you could get your money out, but um, you know, a two-day ACH or whatever the standards were, and we wanted, when the real-time payments came about, we wanted to offer this and offer it for free. Um, because to your point, the counterintuitive uh kind of surprise there is that if you allow people to take their money off your platform easier, they actually give you more money. People were always keeping some amount of money as a, you know, if I needed something in a bind that I would be able to keep it at my big bank. But once we made it, you know, effortless and instantaneous, 24-7 holidays and weekends, we saw people give us incremental money. Um, so you know, and even some of the well-known fintech players today will charge you to take your money off the platform instantly. Um and so we've never charged for that. And we think that that's again something that um, you know, our number one kind of value uh inside the company is to, you know, our clients' well-being. And if we can find ways to pass on the savings from our business model, um, which is you know very automated and software driven, um, we will do that uh because that creates trust because people have better outcomes when they pay less fees and they earn more interest and they tell their friends about it, which obviously leads to lower cost of acquisition and so on.

Sasha Pilch 13:10

It reminds me of in the early days of Ramp, I was fortunate enough to be in a lot of meetings with Eric when he was explaining their business model, which is very much similar in terms of doing right by the customer. Like Ramp is free to join, 1.5% cash back blanket across everything when the other card programs charge to use and have all these hidden mechanisms to determine what cash back you get. And a lot of other CEO's responses were like, wow, like you're giving away a lot. But then look at RAM today, like doing right by the customer, building that trust, lowering your CAC because it becomes such a word of mouth product seems to be like such a great way to go about it.

Alan Imberman 13:55

Yeah, that's what we're betting on. I mean, as you mentioned, I've been doing it since 2015. Others obviously have David was one of the very earliest employees. And, you know, we've seen throughout the years people come out and say things are free and have received very large fines because in the fine print they were actually putting a bunch of your investment into cash and not paying you a fair rate on it. Um, you know, it it there's always things that you know sound too good to be true, and they usually are. I think that, you know, in the near term, sometimes that doesn't give the instant gratification, but the delayed gratification uh that you know, when you're doing the right thing, eventually uh customers will see through it, you know, eventually comes. We see this a lot with you know higher interest rate accounts, and then all of a sudden there's a teaser rate and you go back to some like much lower rate, and people get swindled by that. And so um, you know, we allow people to take the money off easily when they want to transfer their account out uh to another broker using ACAS. We don't charge for that. A lot of firms charge $75 to $100 for you to move your account to another one, uh to another broker. But uh, you know, we have high confidence in what we're doing for people is the right thing to do. Um, but it doesn't always look consensus and uh, you know, it's not always the high momentum thing to do, but uh we're taking a very long-term approach.

Automation That Shrinks Support Needs

Sasha Pilch 15:13

And considering you have so much automation, this then allows you to not have to charge outrageous fees, right? Because like your cost is lower essentially.

Alan Imberman 15:25

For sure. One of the statistics that typically blows away people in the traditional industry is um, you know, we have around 27, we call them product support specialists today, um, for you know, our million five clients. Um, and so that's like 55,000 clients-ish for product support person. Um there's no call center overseas or in the middle of the country. This is you know, real people, some of them with CFA charters, CFP designations, who will answer the phone when you call. You know, you'll be talking to them when you do a live chat. Um, so it's really incredible. And we look at that as um, that's why they're called product support specialists, to actually report to the VP of product. And they work, they're embedded in product teams. And anytime we're getting you know, clients, whether they're calling or writing in or whatever the case may be, we look at that as feedback that we need to fix in the product, not as something where we need to hire more people to answer those questions. And so we're constantly bringing the head of that group to our executive staff meeting uh once a month. We go over the tickets, he has a presentation that he'll give us on different topics, and then the um VP of engineering will assign um you know different projects, different priorities so that we can address tickets. These could be things like referral codes that, you know, for some reason didn't work when people are wanting to get their you know, referral incentive, linking, obviously, as you're uh aware of sometimes can be in state, you know, have some instability. Um so we do that with both our um product support team as well as our brokerage operations team. And uh, yeah, these things allow us to save a lot on costs, but more importantly, our clients who are digital natives, tech forward, they don't want to talk to somebody. They don't want to write an email about a problem. It just things should just work. Um and so we get the benefit of investing in automation not only you know lowers our cost, but it actually improves the client experience, which is something that as a CFO uh I love to hear because we can kind of kill two birds with one stone.

Sasha Pilch 17:34

It's so refreshing to hear that. Like, what a lean team. 27 support experts. This sorry if you don't know the answer, but what is your like revenue per employee?

Alan Imberman 17:46

Our revenue employee, well, it's about a million dollars an employee. Uh depends some people do the calculation with you know average employees or whatever. But you know, today we're uh just to give you an idea, we're around 400 employees, and the 365 was last year's revenue number. So um, you know, it's somewhere in that neighborhood of a million dollars an employee.

Sasha Pilch 18:07

So lean, so impressive. And I love this using the feedback to enhance the product immediately. Like I'm sure that unfortunately doesn't happen at Schwab or Fidelity. Like when I worked for large banks, it was just so siloed. So there was no way that that was going to come back into improving the product so quickly. So Wealthfront is incredible,

Custodial Accounts And Tax Gain Harvesting

Sasha Pilch 18:29

it's wonderful. Um let's talk about some of the products. So Wealthfront announced that it expanded its offering of family wealth management products with the launch of the custodial accounts. This is the latest example of Wealthfront's product expansion to meet growing needs of wealth builders and digital native generations, millennials, and Gen Z. Um it's an alternative to parents who don't qualify for the Trump account and want to save for their children beyond education. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Alan Imberman 19:03

Yeah, I mean, I think you covered a lot of it. Uh, we've been offering 529 accounts since I think November of 2016, actually. Um so we've had those in markets for about 10 years, and that's specifically for saving for education. Um, custodial accounts give you more flexibility in what you can do with the money. Um and you know, they have this thing actually that uh I'm not aware of anybody else doing this, but um, you know, we uh are big proponents of tax optimization and we have tax loss harvesting in our taxable accounts for uh whatever, you know, our automated index investing accounts, our direct indexing accounts, and tax loss harvesting for people who aren't familiar with is if you own an ETF or a stock and it drops in value, if you sell it and you don't buy it back for 30 days, and while you're waiting to buy it back, you buy something that has extremely high correlation with it. So you could think of, you know, you sell Coca-Cola and you buy Pepsi, right? And it's a pretty good approximation. Well, after that 30 days, you can replace or swap back into the primary, and that loss that you took can be used to offset gains either in your portfolio or up to $3,000 a year in uh you know income, annual income, uh like paychecks. Well, for custodial accounts, there's an alternative called we've kind of called tax gain harvesting. And so what happens is the first thirteen hundred and fifty dollars of income earned in a custodial account is uh there's no tax on it. And so what we'll do in these accounts is we will purposely create gains up to that thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. And what that will do is it will constantly increase the tax basis in your child's accounts as well. So when you do uh the the miner eventually does take control of the account, uh, which is usually 18 but can vary by different states, the tax basis for which they would have received the the shares will be a much more stepped-up amount, lowering their taxable bill in the future. So we call this tax gain harvesting instead of tax loss harvesting. And that's a very unique feature of uh custodial accounts that is not uh prevalent in 529s or uh Trump accounts.

Sasha Pilch 21:26

Excellent. And such peace of mind that Wealthfront is doing that automatically for these customers. So that's wonderful.

A Digital-First Mortgage And Refi Push

Sasha Pilch 21:36

Um can we talk a little bit about some of the other products? So, what about Wealthfront's mortgage and refinancing product?

Alan Imberman 21:45

Yeah, so uh Wealthfront Home Lending is um a product that we're pretty early in market with. We um are GA, general availability in Colorado and Texas. Um we will go GA in California soon. This is something where we're kind of building a new business inside of an existing business. And really the insight which we've had for many years was this idea of, you know, again, using our business model to automation and really, you know, low-touch to allow those savings to be shared with clients in the form, in this case, of lower rates on their mortgage as such a delight tool for which we would get referrals and be able to grow very efficiently. And that's typically the biggest cost inside of a mortgage operation is the customer acquisition cost. It can be several thousand dollars. And people are willing to pay that because there's a lot of opportunity to earn a fee on the mortgage. Well, we've looked at this for many years. We've done lending again for about 10 years in our portfolio line of credit margin uh product, but the digitization just wasn't there, and COVID obviously sped that up. Um it made things a lot more digital, including notaries and all of those things. So around 18 months ago, we acquired a small company, uh, had the three licenses, it had some really good subject matter experts and institutional knowledge. Um, and we've created our own product inside Wellfront, very homegrown. Uh, some things we're building in-house, some things we're using third parties for. This is a playbook we've ran with both cash management and uh our automated index investing account. To this day, we're still designing out uh third parties and both of those uh accounts and continuing to see very good margins. I mean, our gross profit margin for those who aren't aware is around 90% today. Um, and so that's again from years of building internally developed software uh proprietary to Welfront that allows us to be very efficient. So we're gonna do the same thing with mortgage. We see our clients, because we offer the ability to do wires with our account and through the linking data uh that we have from what people are doing in their other bank accounts, we see that our clients are doing for the last two years around $2 billion or more dollars of wires to escrow companies. And so if that's a 20% down payment, they're buying $10 billion worth of homes, for which there would be $8 billion of loan opportunity. And that's what we see from people using Wellfront to send the wire. There's a multiple of that where people are using their other bank to send uh these wires. And, you know, our average client is around 35 years old. We obviously the newer clients are younger, but we've now been around so long that we have clients, you know, in their early 20s and clients, you know, obviously very old clients uh as well, like in their late, you know, we have clients in their 70s and 80s. Um, but we have clients really our target client now is anyone born after 1980, which can be, you know, 45, 46 uh years old, all the way down to, you know, I mean, with custodial account, obviously you can have very young clients today. But um, our target client is in the home buying phase and they're buying homes regardless of rates. We want to provide a great digital experience. Uh, what does that mean? That means you could get a mortgage from end to end on a mobile phone. Um, that is not something I think that a lot of people have done. Uh, we also want to create the experience that you would expect. If you all of a sudden want to start playing with the scenarios to see what happens if you, you know, want to buy points or do different things with the mortgage, you know, make it a different number of years. You shouldn't have to call someone and ask them to run this analysis. Uh, we allow you to do that and see the results immediately. So we have these different scenario planners. Um, there's a lot of things that we're constantly rolling out as we build this. And we're very excited. We think that we can improve people's rates at least 50 basis points relative to the national average. Um, and we think even folks who have you know better credit ratings that can get really good rates uh will be able to improve upon those rates as well because of our business model, our willingness to share savings with people and our low cost to deliver. Um, it's a very you know multi-year, obviously, project, but uh so far we feel really good about what we're

The Pricing Moment That Defined Values

Alan Imberman 26:14

seeing.

Sasha Pilch 26:14

So compelling. And an anecdote that I've heard you talk about in other interviews was really doing right by the customer at an all hands, and there was a question of like when should we start charging interest.

Alan Imberman 26:28

Oh yeah. Yeah, this was uh this was very early, actually, in my history. And when we were offering lending products, we were talking about uh the margin loan product. And so with a margin loan, you can borrow uh at Welfront, it's up to 30% against qualified securities. And so if you have a $100,000 portfolio of qualified securities, you could borrow up to $30,000. And at the time, um, this was 2016, so money wasn't moving as fast. So let's say that there was a two-day period for which we would actually send you the money once you had uh gone through the flow of requesting a loan. The question came up in a product review of, well, and this was from uh Andy Ratcliffe, who was the CEO at the time, um, co-founder of Benchmark, um, and he said, Um, when, you know, when should we start charging interest? Would it be when you know the person accepts the loan agreement or when they get the money? And we had somebody um who had come from the traditional industry and he kind of was very new to the company, sitting in the back of the room, and he kind of raised his hand and said, you know, when I worked at XYZ incumbent institution, we would charge it right away. And uh this is very emblematic of Wellfront and the DNA that Andy and David have instilled in the company because Andy asked a very simple question to the employee. He said, if you were the client making this loan, when would you want to be charged for the money? When you took out the paperwork or when you actually got the money? And he's like, I would want to be charged when I got the money. And Andy said, Well, then that's exactly what we're gonna do. And that's the kind of the way, again, you know, values are typically ways to judge your your decisions and always thinking about what's in your client's best interest. It's not one of these things that you know we put on the wall and forget about it, it's something that's constantly brought up um in product reviews to figure out like how would I want to be treated, or the you know, the golden rule. Um, and that's you know the way you know we think. And even Andy would say the platinum rule, which is like, how would you want to be, you know, how do you think the client would want to be treated? That's how we should treat them. So that's a that's that's something that we're obviously taking with us from home lending. And so we're trying to not only make it a uh better experience, but also you know, much more clearer uh and easier to understand. So people feel empowered when they make this decision. They're not so nervous. It's a large uh cost and it's a very emotional decision to you know buy a home. And you're very excited about it, and you're you know very anxious. And so we we definitely want to take care of people. Uh, and it's more than just kind of the great rate, it's the experience uh as well.

Sasha Pilch 29:09

Well, if I ever buy a home in America, I'm gonna use you guys. That sounds really compelling. Um we're almost at time. So is there anything else that we haven't covered off yet that you want to cover off while we have our listeners?

AI Tailwinds And What Comes Next

Alan Imberman 29:24

Um that's a good question. Uh, you know, we've talked about different different product launches that we've done recently. Obviously, custodial is a great way for us to kind of enter and we've already done kind of family uh finance, so we have joint accounts and joint accounts where both the primary and the secondary can manage those accounts. They can see visibility and you can actually restrict access to what your partner sees if you don't want them to see everything. Um and then now with custodial accounts, I think it's a a uh you know a next evolution of this kind of family and wealth planning. I could see us obviously doing more tax-related planning, estate planning, trust and will. Um, you know, we obviously haven't talked about the big um kind of elephant in every room, AI, um, right, and what that allows us uh and everybody to really do. I think it's a great way to give clients better outcomes to educate them when they, you know, are looking to open an account um with anybody who get their finances managed. I think they have the right uh questions and answers now. Um and I think we, you know, that's again, we're benefiting from that because if you were to talk to a, you know, uh an entity that was somewhat all-knowing and asked it what's the best way to invest for somebody who wants, you know, low cost, a, you know, uh a really good return, um, you know, it will it'll recommend WealthRun very highly. And uh so we think that's obviously a good tailwind for us. And we think there's ways for which we can use it in the product, conversational AI, uh, to make the experience even better. And then obviously on the developer side, right, the entire company has access to uh different ways of using uh AI to help us with um whether it's a non-technical person asking for um, you know, questions of the business or the developers, you know, finding ways to be more efficient.

Sasha Pilch 31:16

Wonderful. It's wonderful to see Wealthfront grow with its customers, you know, these millennials that were investing and now they're buying houses and have children that they need to save for, and then you're evolving with AI. So really exciting stuff. Um, and this was great, Alan. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. We're at time now. Um, so I'm gonna ask the question that I ask all guests,

Favorite Books And Closing Requests

Sasha Pilch 31:40

which is what are your favorite books? One personal, it can be fiction, nonfiction, and one professional.

Alan Imberman 31:48

Yeah, I would say professionally, uh, I came across a great book. It's called A Piece of the Action by Joe Nasserra. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but uh, this is essentially the prehistory of Wealthfront and all the competitors who built on top of it. Um, it is the story of Schwab, it is the story of the original credit card drop, it's the money market fund creation, uh Fidelity, adding checking to a money market fund, the Peter Lynch, it goes on and on with all of the innovations in finance. And what you'll find is actually that it's one of those things where you know history doesn't rhyme, but it repeats itself quite a bit. Um, and so that's one I highly recommend. I think I've read it three or four times. Um, and then on a personal level, now this um I'd have to think about. Um you know, I don't know, I'm I'm pretty boring. I actually enjoy reading finance books. Um I I know that's uh a little boring to be the CFO of Wolf Rod, then. Yeah, I guess that does help. Um I mean, if I look around my desk and my uh what I recently read, um, you know, one that's coming to mind which is kind of boring, uh, but Reading Player One was a great book to read. I know it came out as a movie. I get into a sci-fi kick every now and then uh when I'm tired of going like into this really deep finance. Uh and there's a couple other uh sci-fi books I really like, but Reading Player One, for somebody who's not, you know, full-blown sci-fi, it's it's a great way to kind of uh get intro into that. And it's extremely entertaining. Uh it has a video game aspect to it as well, if people are into video games and uh very futuristic, uh kind of dystopian future uh at the same time. So really cool.

Sasha Pilch 33:35

I love that. Well, thank you so much, Alan. This has been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. And to the listeners, thank you so much for listening. If there's anyone that you think would find this podcast valuable, please share it. Um, like and subscribe, and we'll speak to you again next month. Thanks, everyone.