Garrett's Profile

Charities are tough: their operational model is part of the product and is open to a lot of scrutiny. This TED talk by Dan Pallotta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfAzi6D5FpM) brings up the fact that people running massive charities (think the Red Cross) earn, relative to the heads of other large organizations, low compensation. This is largely because if they did get paid a lot of money, they would be criticized for it. The result is you end up with examples like the Wounded Warrior Project where the organization is inefficient because the human capital, while their hearts are in the right place, tends to be low relative to private sector organizations.

This is a great example of what happens when traditional product offerings are unbundled. When you look at CommondBond and their competitors, robo-advisers (e.g., Betterment), Ally Bank (just savings, checking, CDs), RobinHood (zero fee brokerage), Stripe (payment processing), they’re exposing large banks as poorly cobbled together financial services. Using any one of these services from a conventional bank tends to be paperwork-intensive with poor customer service. Each of the new unbundled offerings is able to focus on making one product amazing to use, whereas each product at a large bank has to fit into the context of a larger business and operating model and therefore is much more likely to be misaligned.