In this Episode
Rory Holland interviews John Erik Metcalf, the co-founder and CEO of Upgraded, a tech subscription service that allows users to upgrade their devices effortlessly. They discuss Metcalf’s journey from co-founding a co-working space in Austin to launching Upgraded, the challenges and opportunities in the fintech landscape, and the importance of creating a user-friendly experience for customers. Metcalf emphasizes the need for innovation in the consumer electronics market and how Upgraded aims to simplify device management for families, positioning itself as a leader in the fintech space.
Key Takeaways
- Upgraded is revolutionizing how consumers access technology through subscription services.
- John Erik Metcalf’s journey started with self-led learning and has progressed all over the world.
- Upgraded’s model focuses on making device upgrades seamless and affordable.
- In the near future it will be possible for families to manage their devices like a small business does.
- Vertical integration is key to Upgraded’s long-term strategy for the circular economy.
- Fintech should be about helping people in meaningful ways.
- With the right business model, refurbished devices can put high-quality computers into the hands of many more people.
- AI should enable more companies, including legacy companies and startups to build the services they need from scratch.
- A big part of Upgraded’s success has come from developing a strong narrative.
Podcast Episode Transcript
Introduction to Upgraded and Living in Austin
Rory Holland (00:01)
Well, John, good to see you. Welcome to Mighty Finsights. I’m Rory Holland and I’m joined by John Erik Metcalf, founder and CEO at… co-founder and CEO, right?
John Erik Metcalf (00:09)
Yeah, co-founder.
Rory Holland (00:10)
Co-founder. So you’ve got co-founders.
John Erik Metcalf (00:11)
Definitely have co-founders.
Rory Holland (00:11)
At Upgraded. So super excited. So let me just, for everyone listening, let me just read what I, right off your website, Upgraded is a tech subscription service that allows people to get a new MacBook every two years with low monthly payments, AppleCare plus effortless upgrades. I love that. I’m a Mac user, so definitely needed.
John Erik Metcalf (00:38)
Yeah, we wanted to create something that we always wanted or that I always wanted. We saw Apple launch their iPhone upgrade program in 2015 and thought that is the way that all consumer electronics should be sold, both new and used, but just this ability to use it for the time that you need it and get it back. And especially for the crazy ones that are photographers, videographers, illustrators, software developers. People that are already upgrading their Mac every two or three years, we just wanted to create a system so they could put that on autopilot, just like people do for phones. And I hope obviously we’ll get into this, but I don’t want to stop there. That’s our very first offering.
Rory Holland (01:19)
Yeah. Well first, to kind of get these rolling, thanks for that background. We talked about this downstairs, but for everyone else, Austin’s home now.
Homeschooling and Building a Company in China
John Erik Metcalf (01:34)
Yeah, Austin’s home. I’m back in Austin. Excited to be back. I went to UT and started the first co-working space in Austin when I was in undergrad. And that kind of kicked me off into this path of living in different places. So we started a place called Conjuctured that was on East 7th Street and filled that up with freelancers. And then I’ll just fast forward, we or I put together a panel called Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills. So was about the burgeoning tech ecosystem in Austin. And one of the guys that was on there was from Shanghai, a fund in Shanghai. We used to have the WordPress barbecue at Conjunctured. He came over with like a delegation of other folks from China and saw everything, told us, co-working is really cool. Would you want to help us start a space in Shanghai? And I was 24, I’m like, yes, that sounds awesome. So moved to Shanghai and got a space going there called 88 Spaces that that fund, they had a floor and a building and they were only using half of it. So they just gave us the other half and me and some other guys that were, that knew Shanghai better, put together the space. And that kicked off this whole experience of living in mainland China, studying Mandarin and starting a data analytics company in Hong Kong. So was there for five years total.
Rory Holland (03:06)
Fascinating. And before, so are you from Austin originally?
John Erik Metcalf (03:11)
I’m from San Antonio and more specifically I’m from Bulverde, and my dad’s a mechanic, I grew up in a single-wide mobile home with a two-car garage next to it where my dad worked out of. So this refurbishing things or giving devices new life or repairing everything is something I grew up with because, you know my, we were not making a lot of money and so if I had something that was, we’re going to make that last. We’re going to fix it. Keep it going.
Rory Holland (03:45)
Yeah, so what’s one thing about growing up in that small town outside of San Antonio in a single-wide that shaped who you are today?
John Erik Metcalf (03:53)
Well, I was also homeschooled. So my parents maybe were more hippie back then and thought that I didn’t need to go to public school. If you ask my dad why he decided to homeschool me, he would specifically say, “I wanted you to have positive self-talk. I wanted you to, when you threw a question against the wall for it to come back, I can do that.” And he would reflect on his experience and specifically in like his early childhood education where he felt like, instead of throwing the ball and it coming back: “You can do it. That’s a great idea.” It always came back negative for him like “Don’t try, you’re not good enough” and for some reason he associated that with school in the early days, and so he was like we don’t need to do that, all you need is from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to do something educational and you’re gonna be fine. And so I think that taught me specifically how to be autodidactic, meaning figure out how to learn for myself, teach myself. My parents let me learn kind of however I wanted. So we would often go to like book fairs and I would get new books, specifically like math books or history books, and I would get really interested in one. I remember having a math book one time and that was really thick it was like the entire year of math all in one big book, and I got really excited about that book and my mom was like well you can just do it as long as you want and so you know I’m just two weeks of nothing but math from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. because that’s what I was super interested in, and then I would get burned out and wouldn’t be sure what to do for a little while. And then I’d get into a book. And if I wanted to just read a book and sit in a tree for the entire day, literally the entire day, that was totally cool with my parents.
Rory Holland (05:55)
I love that. actually. When my, my son and I talked about this, my son was homeschooled as well.
John Erik Metcalf (05:59)
No way, oh.
Rory Holland (06:01)
Yeah. So when he was, my daughter, have a 20-year-old daughter now, she’s down in here in downtown Austin as well. And my son motocross racer and so to, once he ranked the national level national rankings, we agreed at least at 12 to go full time which meant homeschool, which meant travel all the time. So my son and I lived in an RV.
John Erik Metcalf (06:21)
Yeah.
Rory Holland (06:22)
Basically like a single wide travel trailer that we could pull behind a Sprinter van. And we, for about five years, like we were on the road living. And so I worked from that from there. And so he had to be self-motivated to get through his schoolwork. I was working. And being his mechanic, and his dad, and his trainer, and a psychologist, and everything else right to perform. And so yeah, I’m a huge believer of like self directed education. And I love you talked about being up in a tree or whatever, particularly boys, because we’re so kinetic and we’re going and all that sort of, the idea of sitting in a box did not work for my son all day. It just did not. But when he could focus on say English for a couple weeks, get it done, or math, or whatever he wanted to, he could drop in and out of things. It kept him interested. And I think overall it taught him a lot more than maybe some folks that might benefit from going to school every day. But I certainly value what you just said.
John Erik Metcalf (07:25)
Yeah. People learn differently and you got to know how to adapt to that. Sounds like that was the right thing for your son. And as quick aside, my dad used to race motocross. And him and his brother are super into motorcycles. And one of them lives out in Spicewood, Todd Metcalf.
Rory Holland (07:36)
Okay I, oh I know the name.
John Erik Metcalf (07:37)
So that’s a fun connection there. Small world.
Rory Holland (07:39)
Yeah, my son is now 18. He went pro at 17. And so it’s been quite a journey and a lot of fun. And it’s been amazing how many people I’ve met. I’ve said similar things like you just said, my dad or my uncle or my friend or whatever. Yeah, it’s a great sport. Yeah, very best. But Texas is a great place to live, know, ride dirt bikes. That’s for sure. All right. So this is great. Thanks for the background. So let’s dive in Upgraded. So what’s like, what’s the elevator pitch? What service do you offer? I know we talked a little bit about it, but like what
Rory Holland (08:19)
What business would you say you’re really in when you think about the work that you do?
The Journey of Upgraded: From Sweden to the U.S.
John Erik Metcalf (08:22)
Yeah. I feel like I can’t, I gotta give you some more background. So from 2016 to today, we have been running an iPhone, MacBook, Xbox upgrade programs in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. So we randomly got this opportunity. I think Apple launched the iPhone upgrade program in the U.S. in 2025, 2015.
And then in 2016, we were in Y Combinator and got connected to Apple. They said, Apple Sweden has been wanting to launch an upgrade program. It’s a high income country. That’s perfect for them. People want to get a new Mac, a new iPhone every year. But we’re not giving a lot of resources to them. It’s 10 million people. and then Scandinavia in particular is four different languages and four different currencies. So it was kind of a mix of software that you could build and potentially not reuse. So it wasn’t something that Apple was going to build out. And so me and my co-founders were like, we will take that on. That sounds awesome. So we up and moved from San Francisco to Sweden, built that out, and it’s still running today. So we’ve run programs on Apple, all Apple lines of business. We had Xbox All Access, where you could get a new Xbox every couple of years and it included a digital game subscription. And we also have Apple Financial Services, which is like their B2B offering that runs through our platform. So we’ve been running all of that stuff since 2016. That company is great and runs itself, but it’s kind of isolated to the Nordics and it’s very specific, which is, you know, was our opportunity in the beginning and kind of the reason that I think that it hasn’t blown up as well. So we’ve ran it for you know, have been running it since then, but when the pandemic started and I was coming back to the U.S. cause I was living in Sweden, I just kept getting this feeling like we just, we just need to start this in the U.S. we need to build our own retailer. I, we’ve been serving retailers for years and, you know, trying to get them to do specific things that we wanted to do. And so just decided let’s take our platform and build an offering over here.
But it took a while for us to get started because we needed a lender to be a partner and we’re starting from zero. So getting somebody, you know, a real good lender in there took a long time. And it wasn’t until Apple introduced us to Citizens Bank, who is the lender behind their official iPhone upgrade program, that we were ever able to really get it kicked off. And so this is, you know, the company in Scandinavia continues to run. This company, we got the domain getupgraded.com and we really started it in earnest just six months ago. And so back to answering your question today, our offering is 0% interest for 36 months. If that’s your thing, like great. Then you can just spread the cost of the device over time. Or if you’re one of the crazy people who want to get a new MacBook every two years, there’s an option to do that. And, so then that’s what we have today. Longer term, of course, we want to do this on a wide range of consumer electronics and build this into what looks more like a service. So something that is, I think that families are more and more like small businesses today, especially in terms of their devices, because there’s 20 of them around the house, especially if you have kids, then you have iPads and watches and it’s like this collection of stuff all over the place. And so we want to build something that helps you manage all those devices and kind of put them on autopilot and say, you know, kind of set it and forget it. Like for example, my wife always wants a new iPhone every year. I want a two-year-old, I want a used iPhone. I’ll take a new one every two years, but I always want it to be used. And let’s set it to always transfer to my son and let’s have a couple iPads that are used and they have insurance on them. And you might also have all of your other devices in your house and you can see what they’re worth kind of at a live view of what is this portfolio of devices worth and we’ll be out here scraping the web to make sure that we have live prices of all that. And if you wanted to take action on something like get rid of this, get rid of this, get rid of this, we’ll send boxes for all of those things and transfer you cash. Okay, so that is like more the direction we want to go. We’re six months in and just getting started.
Rory Holland (13:23)
Oh boy, I resonate with that devices everywhere. Yeah, I’m feeling I like the way that you framed it like families are kind of like small businesses genuinely like you have so much product. What’s the thinking behind the refurbished side? Because I really like that because we have these devices and I know you can go to marketplaces to try to sell them or trade them in or it’s kind of cumbersome, doesn’t always work out great. So is that the idea like you can recycle to and kind of move things through?
John Erik Metcalf (14:04)
Correct. Yeah, I think that’s so cumbersome because one of the other things that I want to do with Upgraded is vertically integrate the business. So let’s fast forward a few years. I could imagine us selling the devices, underwriting the consumers, having a robotics line or refurbishment center ourselves that we own. And maybe also doing brokering the insurance. So on the refurbishment piece, I think the reason why it’s often so disjointed or difficult to get rid of things, you know, we want to make it as easy to sell something as it is to buy something or as easy to get rid of something as it is to buy something. I think that’s something that has not been figured out. The reason for that is because the refurbishment companies or the buyback companies are separate entities from the retailer. And so it often just makes it for a disjointed process. We want to just unify all of that into one offering and just make it as easy as possible. And it’s important because retail in general is a low margin business. And so the more things that we can put under one roof, we don’t have to give away 1 % here and 2 % there.
The Financial Technology Powering Upgraded
Rory Holland (15:28)
Yeah, love it. Well, we talked a lot about, we say the word fintech a lot in our community. A lot of people don’t understand it. I’m asked all the time what does that mean? Right? For people that aren’t in our industry. So I’m gonna ask you the question about how do you see Upgraded leveraging the latest fintech technology to basically improve the lives of your customers, your partners, your service partners, that’s the thing.
John Erik Metcalf (15:50)
Yep. Well, our first offering is this, it’s, I’ll go slightly deep into it because your audiences is fintech based. So we use a 36 month closed end term loan as the kind of the underlying financial instrument to create what is effectively a subscription, assuming they use the option to upgrade after 12 months. So you could think about as the customer is paying down to zero over the course of 36 months, they have the option to upgrade after 24. What we have there is a guaranteed residual value. So it essentially turns out to be 33 % approximately is paid of the device’s values every year. And what we know is that there are bulk buyers in the space for consumer electronics that will buy back our MacBooks at 37%. After they’re two years old, they will buy them back for 37 % of MSRP. So we buy it back from the customer at 33%. We have a guarantee to buy it back at 37%. I’m sorry, and I’m trying to get back to your question. We’re using this term loan because it’s what’s readily available from lenders. You know, 36 month term loan is common. But I think that what we don’t see, what we want is the ability to drop in, have what would effectively be just a large line of credit. If we’re going to offer you to be able to help you manage all of the devices that are in your home, then we need, it could be a good amount of money. We essentially need a line of credit where we can drop on different payment durations on each one. So you have 36, this laptop is over 36 months. I’m buying a cable that’s going to go over six months. I’m buying a MacBook or an iPhone that I’m going to upgrade after a year. So that’s 24 months. And maybe I’m getting a cable and it’s going to be a pay in four, something like that. We need to bring more of those types of devices to market. And I think Klarna, Affirm, those type of guys, what they have that’s slightly better is they have product-level understanding of what the customer purchased. Citizens Bank or any other kind of legacy bank, they just have a 36 month term loan. They don’t really care what gets dropped on it.
We want to know exactly what’s on each of those loans. What is that device? What is this for? Because it has a different… Because you might apply different things to it, different residual values, different insurance, different risk.
Rory Holland (18:55)
Yeah, what I’m hearing you say and what I love the idea of is the idea that one control, because I know if you have different carriers for devices, let’s say, it’s a little complicated to me. Yeah, pretty simple, right? But it’s complicated to me and knowing where you are in the process, when you can trade in when you can’t, and particularly if you have more than one carrier, then when you actually own a device or do you ever actually really get to own device? And then if you trade it in, you’re extending your contract, all these kinds of things that are fairly more complicated than they need to be the idea of transparency from what I hear you saying about upgrading with some of your features and capabilities where people can actually control when they trade in or when they pay off or however they want to do upgrade those kind of choices. Sounds like it’s back in the customer’s hands. So using fintech and other financial tools to then bring better products and services to the market from a financial perspective. Is that right?
Understanding the Upgrade Model and Its Benefits
John Erik Metcalf (19:47)
Yeah, and more types of offerings. So we started out with this upgrade offering. But what we’ve realized with talking to customers and watching the types of customers that apply for our program is there’s a need for just such a big swath of options here. So while our name is Upgraded and we’re focused on upgrade programs, you know, I think today half of our customers are utilizing just a 36 month term loan and the other half are in it for the upgrade option. And so we probably, we need to bring more things to life, including a lease to own and maybe a lease to own that is not only focused on subprime. It’s not a rent a center, but it’s still a lease, more like a car lease where it’s a lease option on a device, but it’s targeted to a more premium customer or high FICO customer. We just need this whole range of things. And I think if we can bring those to life under our own brand, controlling the servicing, controlling the underwriting that will be able to create a better product for customers and ultimately steal several billions of dollars of sales from the incumbent consumer electronics retailers. I see no reason that we couldn’t steal. I’m saying steal, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but at least one to two, one or one to 3 billion in sales from these retailers. If we can get our, if we can succeed in growing our brand, getting our name out there, having a certain level of brand awareness in the United States that we can steal that one to $3 billion in five years or so.
Rory Holland (21:22)
Yeah, seems like the market size is plenty of room.
John Erik Metcalf (21:24)
Yeah, correct.
Rory Holland (21:25)
That’s actually a good segue. So the next thing I want to talk about is about your brand. And so how do you feel about how Upgraded is positioned in the market? Do you feel like your story is where you want it to be? Any areas you think you could be sharp and sharpened? If so, like why and how?
John Erik Metcalf (21:52)
Yeah, I’ll just go back to coworking really quick. When we first started talking about coworking, it was so funny in the 2006 to 2009 timeframe, we always had to explain to people what coworking was. And it’s a bit like that, that we have to explain what an upgrade program is or what our offering is. It’s not always possible to just describe it in a text ad or like a Google text or in a simple display ad. We just started creating videos more where there’s either me or our head of growth or describing what the product is. Because I think consumers maybe need at 20 seconds of somebody talking to them, telling them what our offering is. It’s a little confusing. You know, people ask, “Is this a subscription? Is it a lease? Is it a loan? You know, what exactly is this?” And so that’s a challenge that we’re trying to figure out.
Rory Holland (22:55)
Yes, so the narrative and the story it sounds like as I read what you guys do, it seems pretty straightforward, well-positioned. But when I think about the brand itself and all the things you want to do, that story and that narrative sounds like maybe how you message it, what the story and the narrative is. Getting that out more clearly might be a challenge. Is that accurate?
John Erik Metcalf (23:12)
Oh yeah, especially if we’re talking about what we want to do into the future. All of the like bigger plans that I hope to bring to life. Right now we just try to keep it as simple as possible to say, you know, this is a program where can get a MacBook with low monthly payments, AppleCare Plus included, and an option to upgrade in 24 months. So try not to overload, folks.
Rory Holland (23:34)
Keep it simple first.
John Erik Metcalf (23:35)
Yeah, yeah.
Rory Holland (23:36)
So on a similar note, how do you feel about your marketing? Like do you feel like the marketing you’re doing is hitting the mark or room for improvement? Like what’s working? What’s not?
John Erik Metcalf (23:52)
We’re trying to figure it out. We hired some external PR, external performance marketing in the beginning. Tried both of them for three months and then decided we wanted to build the competence in-house. And so we just hired a head of growth and our UI/UX designer has taken over and was like, okay, I’m going to understand how to do Meta ads.
And I love that we’re building that competence in house. I think probably being a software developer, I’m always of the build it versus buy it mentality or build it inside of the business. But yeah, we are really just at scratching the surface of figuring it out. Me personally, my last two companies were both enterprise B2B. So I’m not familiar with how to build a consumer brand, but I’m loving figuring it out. And I love being on customer support chat, talking to customers. That’s, you can learn so much.
Rory Holland (24:59)
Yeah, and that’s great that you brought that up. I wanted to ask if you can share any specific stories about how upgrade has made a tangible difference in someone’s life, like any particular stories you can share.
John Erik Metcalf (25:14)
Yeah. That’s funny. There is lots of people who have said in that kind of creative class group of software developers, videographers, photographers, who have said, this is awesome. I’m already upgrading my Mac, but it’s always cumbersome. It’s hassle to sell the old one on Facebook Marketplace or whatever and it just kind of ends up sitting around. Thanks for making it easier. That said, usually I think just from my personal where I’m coming from, I’m like, cool, okay, we made it easier for like what is effectively this wealthy guy to get a new MacBook every two years. I realized after we started this that I don’t have a big, it doesn’t feel like a huge win. I do feel more happy, I realized, when we’re helping people afford a device that they couldn’t necessarily get into. When they’re buying their first MacBook Air for a college student that’s going to go off to college and now they can afford it because it was $30 a month and maybe at 0% interest, that actually gives me more of a positive feeling. It made me realize that, that’s one of the things that made me realize that we can’t just serve the very top of the market. I think that makes sense to start there, but we need to go, I don’t know, call it down market. We need to go into the long tail of used devices and helping folks that have no credit or are starting their credit journey.
Building the Future with Fintech
Rory Holland (27:00)
That’s great. What would you say is one of the biggest opportunities you’ve seen right now for Upgraded? For your business, could be for Upgraded or it also would be for the fintech industry.
John Erik Metcalf (27:03)
Well, I could do both. If it’s the fintech industry, then I think that it’s this, can do everything, which is kind of the world that we’re living in, in the era of AI, where you may have cobbled together lots of services to bring a fintech to life. If you have capable developers, you can build those things yourself. So I would assume that we will see a lot more fintech companies that are saying we don’t need to use these five service providers. We’ve actually built all of this ourselves, which may cause a shakeup in the market. And I think that’s maybe just quickly, I would reply that to Upgraded it as well. That’s why we want to be vertically integrated. I seriously think that we can be a billion dollar retailer and have 100 people or less. If we could do it with 30, that would be amazing, but it’s just, everybody is so much more effective when they have Cursor plus ChatGPT kind of giving them a tailwind.
Rory Holland (28:29)
Yeah, hope a year from now we’re talking about 30 people, billion dollar retailer with you. That would be great.
John Erik Metcalf (28:34)
That would be insane and so, so cool.
Mentorship and Career Development
Rory Holland (28:37)
Who’s been, who would you say has been a key influence for you on your journey so far?
John Erik Metcalf (28:44)
That makes me think of people that I love to read their writing. I’m not sure that I’m going to remember all of their names, but the top one is the managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, Kirsten. I can’t remember her last name. She, yeah, I think is a pioneer in growing or in identifying consumer brands. So Forerunner was a early investor in companies like Aura and Chime. And yeah, I love everything that she puts out. I’ll blank out on the other two investors that I’m thinking of that I often read, but they’re fintech investors. I don’t know. Otherwise, I maybe often tell my, often ask myself, why don’t I have more mentors? Maybe something that I often think that I need to work on. Though now I seem to just use ChatGPT as my coach.
Rory Holland (29:47)
Yeah, it’s readily available all the time.
John Erik Metcalf (29:48)
Yeah, yeah it’s an amazing service.
Rory Holland (29:49)
Yeah, I think we end up walking… my experience has been… We often maybe don’t label someone a mentor. Like I know in my younger career, people kept telling me to get one. I’m like, how do you get one? Yeah. Yeah. Where do they come from? How do you get one? Just ask. I’m like, OK, well, that feels weird. It feels I always wanted to be more organic. But for me it was more organic, like people walk alongside you without a label or a particular title of what they’re a mentor or not. Yeah, I’ve just found that as I look back on my journey, and they might not even consider I don’t think they really considered themselves a mentor. But they were to me, like you said, there’s some authors that I read that I like, or are actual people in my community that might often many times not even in the industry. But they’re they guide us and help us and support us and encourage us and sometimes a shoulder to cry on. We need it, right? Things are tough.
The Role of Fintech in Enhancing Consumer Experience
So I wanted to talk about the future. So what’s on the horizon for Upgraded? You shared a lot of really cool things. Like what’s the plan for this year? Any exciting projects or goals that you want to tease out for us?
John Erik Metcalf (31:06)
Yeah, it’s for us it’s looking for additional opportunities to help more people. So that’s bringing on more devices today. We only have MacBooks. We wanted to start there because it’s a very big market. 14,000 MacBooks sold a day in the U.S. It’s wild number.
Rory Holland (31:20)
Hold on a second. 14,000? A day?
John Erik Metcalf (31:22)
U.S consumers buy five million new MacBooks a year. So that’s fourteen thousand a day if you do yeah wild number.
Rory Holland (31:43)
Wow, wow. Okay, hold on. I gotta dig on that. So would you say that part of what Upgraded is doing is helping recycle those? Creating a better market for refurbished?
John Erik Metcalf (31:53)
Yeah, we’d like to think that once a device enters our ecosystem that it could stay there until it’s ready to be recycled. So all of these new devices that we’re selling, our plan is not to sell it to that 37% buyer that I mentioned earlier, it’s to get it back, refurbish it and list it again on our market for a lower price. Yeah, and do that over and over again. And that might also require us, we probably could do this in all in the U.S, but ideally it would also mean that we would go into markets that have different income levels so that we could move those devices around.
Rory Holland (32:35)
That’s wonderful. That’s part of our mission at CSTMR, my agency is helping serve the underserved. And there’s oftentimes they’re overlooked or they don’t have great choices. So I love that you just said that. That’s great. So zooming out, with the advent of AI and everything crazy going on, think this work kind of a magic ball here trying to decide and see where this goes. But I’m curious where you see the fintech industry hitting in the next three to five years.
John Erik Metcalf (33:07)
I guess I would just go back to… I don’t know if consolidation is the right word, but companies being able to build more of the stack themselves and being able to eliminate partners that they’ve been using because they were able to build the service. If that’s not the direction it does go, that is certainly the direction it should go. If there’s any legacy players they should hire a great software development team and just build all of these services that they using. Otherwise, there’s a, I’m blanking on his name, somebody that always says that the best business model for AI is Fintech. So embedding services, fintech services, inside of agents that take action for us. I think one of the things that Kirsten at Forerunner talks about is AI being able to take us from a world where what we were looking for was access. Everyone was looking for access to everything and it ended up that we had analysis paralysis or paralysis by analysis and everything is just so available to us, but what AI allows us to do or what agents allow us to do is to get to know us and allow us to relax, be the CEO of our own life and say, this is all I actually need. I just need, I’m trying to use our own example. I just need these devices and I’ll them on this regular schedule and then I can just chill and not have to worry about the next thing. So if AI can help us refine those things and move into this age of more specialized to the consumer or to the business, I think that would be a great thing. And maybe it can also lead to some more relaxation or lower stress levels.
Rory Holland (35:28)
Oh, I love this. We have so much to manage. There’s a lot going on all the time.
John Erik Metcalf (35:31)
Correct.
Rory Holland (35:32)
So taking some of those things off the table would be wonderful. Follow on to that is how do you hope Upgraded, you’ve somewhat maybe answered this question, maybe you summarize it. How do you hope Upgraded will contribute to that future that you just described?
John Erik Metcalf (35:53)
Yeah. I hope that we can have a conver, I hope that Upgraded as an agent can have a conversation with someone, understand what their goals are in life, what their family looks like in terms of who is there, what are people in the family doing for a living or what are their goals? And we can provide the devices that make everybody superhuman, we can deliver them to them in a really simplistic, chill way. And we can help them to not overspend or overbuy because the truth is that most people will be really well served on a three-year-old MacBook Air that they pay $19 a month for. That’s actually a great device.
The Deeper Purpose of Fintech Innovation
Rory Holland (36:50)
Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. That’s awesome. So I want to talk about kind of one final question. Just ask you this. You mentioned where you grew up, how you grew up, somewhere on that journey, you met someone, got introduced to finance, somehow got into fintech. And today you run a fintech company.
John Erik Metcalf (37:01)
Yeah.
Rory Holland (37:02)
So for someone kind of just stepping into it or wanting to get into the industry, whether they’re a young professional or maybe just your younger self, what’s one piece of advice you might give them to help them thrive and get into fintech and thrive in it?
John Erik Metcalf (37:31)
Fintech is about… To me, it’s about helping people. So it’s about helping businesses or helping consumers be able to manage their lives more easily. I don’t know about how to get into it. I don’t think you necessarily need to get into fintech. You should get into solving problems for people and trying to make their lives better. And often, that involves paying for things. That involves how we purchase, how we pay over time, how we score risk, how the world goes around. So I would say just to look at those problems instead. And if fintech rolls into that solution that you’re thinking about, which it often does, then don’t be afraid to build in that space because it is no longer a world that is only accessible by the big banks or something like that. It’s not a world that’s limited to Bank of America and Chase and Wells Fargo or something like that.
Rory Holland (38:42)
Yeah, fantastic. Man, it’s been a pleasure.
John Erik Metcalf (38:43)
Yeah.
Rory Holland (38:44)
I’m so glad you’re in town.
John Erik Metcalf (38:52)
It’s great. So I look forward to seeing you again.
Rory Holland (38:44)
John Erik with Upgraded, just so impressed by what you build, brother. I wish you guys all the greatest success and count us in your corner. Anything I can do to help you. Thanks so much.
John Erik Metcalf (38:54)
Thanks so much. Thank you.
***End Transcript***
