Getting off the VC Treadmill with Brandon Arvanaghi, CEO of Meow
This is a spicy one! 🌶️
This week we sat down with Brandon Arvanaghi from Meow.com to discuss his journey from money burning crypto company to profitable fintech. His tweet last year about hitting the profitability milestone had some obvious, and some less intuitive, take aways from their experience. Everything from opting out of the VC treadmill to applying the Costco model to low margin financial services.
Some other key takeaways:
- Brandon built Meow to $1B+ in assets with just 12 people by rejecting Silicon Valley’s “growth at all costs” playbook. His secret? Being profitable and savage about staying lean. “The future is lean - you can’t go from 1000 people down to 10 and pass back savings, but you can stay lean from the start.”
- Brandon’s building Meow like “Costco for financial services” - focusing on rock-bottom prices and passing savings to customers vs the typical VC-backed approach of sneakily raising prices to hit growth targets. He believes in 5-6 years, when pricing becomes fully transparent, this will be the only way to compete.
- “VCs are lemmings” — Brandon says the 18-month runway advice is a psyop to keep founders dependent on VCs. He argues most VCs just follow each other and care more about looking good to their LPs than helping build real businesses. The rare exceptions? Maybe 1 in 20 VCs.
- “Stay in the game, win the game” - Brandon argues real innovation doesn’t require betting on non-existent markets. His advice? Pick obvious bets without market risk, stay profitable, and make them 10x better through execution. “How can you not make a generational outcome if you just keep pushing the ball forward?”
Big thanks to Brandon for really going there with us. He shares lived experience around many of the ideas we've been advocating for at indie for years. To see someone so fully embrace those ideas and find incredible success on the other side is great validation for others wishing they could go their own way too.
We hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as we enjoyed recording it.
This week we sat down with Brandon Arvanaghi from Meow.com to discuss his journey from money burning crypto company to profitable fintech. His tweet last year about hitting the profitability milestone had some obvious, and some less intuitive, take aways from their experience. Everything from opting out of the VC treadmill to applying the Costco model to low margin financial services.
Some other key takeaways:
- Brandon built Meow to $1B+ in assets with just 12 people by rejecting Silicon Valley’s “growth at all costs” playbook. His secret? Being profitable and savage about staying lean. “The future is lean - you can’t go from 1000 people down to 10 and pass back savings, but you can stay lean from the start.”
- Brandon’s building Meow like “Costco for financial services” - focusing on rock-bottom prices and passing savings to customers vs the typical VC-backed approach of sneakily raising prices to hit growth targets. He believes in 5-6 years, when pricing becomes fully transparent, this will be the only way to compete.
- “VCs are lemmings” — Brandon says the 18-month runway advice is a psyop to keep founders dependent on VCs. He argues most VCs just follow each other and care more about looking good to their LPs than helping build real businesses. The rare exceptions? Maybe 1 in 20 VCs.
- “Stay in the game, win the game” - Brandon argues real innovation doesn’t require betting on non-existent markets. His advice? Pick obvious bets without market risk, stay profitable, and make them 10x better through execution. “How can you not make a generational outcome if you just keep pushing the ball forward?”
Big thanks to Brandon for really going there with us. He shares lived experience around many of the ideas we've been advocating for at indie for years. To see someone so fully embrace those ideas and find incredible success on the other side is great validation for others wishing they could go their own way too.
We hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as we enjoyed recording it.