Background

Questions

1. Could you start by talking a bit about Pinwheel and what inspired you to build it?
2. Can you talk a little bit more about the incumbent company, Equifax, who are one of the leaders in employment and income verification? What’s their model? How has it changed over the last five years that led to the opportunity for you to create Pinwheel?
3. You've talked about real-time versus static, and reducing friction and paperwork through digitization. But you also talked about data quality—can you talk more about data quality and the depth of data you can get from a payroll system, versus what you might get from Equifax or something similar?
4. Currently, there's a lot of activity in the payroll API space. Can you talk about tailwinds in general that you see for the payroll API sector? What's behind this unbundling of payroll and rebundling it into every app?
5. On the inequity point, are there Pinwheel customers that you would point where the company basically wouldn't exist without Pinwheel?
6. On that point, just to help folks understand, Pinwheel does read and write?
7. We’ve talked about the Plaid comparison, and one of the things that comes up a lot is how, early on, Plaid had to deal with uncooperative banks and they had to scrape data. Are payroll providers cooperating with this because it makes their data more interoperable?
8. Can you talk about how you see the core technology? What is the core technology that you've built and how do you think about your core competency with respect to that?
9. Truework is also launching an API product. Can you help folks understand the advantages and drawbacks of starting off as an API company versus being an employment income verification company that’s launching an API?
10. How do you guys position against Atomic, Argyle and also Plaid, which is obviously getting into this space? What's your thesis on what it'll take to win and why?
11. What stops the competitors from becoming CRAs like you are?
12. One of the challenges of API companies is finding the right company at the right time and selling into a specific use case when you have a broad based platform. In that sense, how do you think about go-to-market and sales? What's worked for you? How do you get on the roadmap when there’s a lot of stakeholders and competing initiatives that need to get done?
13. One of the things that you've mentioned repeatedly is this philosophy around employees owning their own data. Is that something that’s a bright line that would prevent you or make you not want to go into the space of a company like Finch, which is employers connecting company-wide data into tools that help underwrite company loans or company FP&A? With the underlying technology, presumably there's a lot of overlap.
14. Speaking in general about TAM expansion opportunities and upside opportunities, direct deposit is a force that’s flying under the radar. For a neobank operator, being able to get a customer to switch their direct deposit from a traditional bank into their new app is important. Can you talk about how much of an enabler this is for the vertical finance and neobank type companies, in terms of pulling companies away from competitors and also frictionless onboarding into a new app experience?
15. Are Pinwheel's opportunities geographically constrained? What do you think about moving into the international space?
16. When we talk about unbundling and rebundling, it was interesting to hear you describing the flow of funds with the payroll system at the top. A lot of these vertical SaaS companies, if they're going to embed payroll, might do so using a company like Check. Does the existence of a company like Check threaten this vision of the long tail of payroll, because they would also be both embedded payroll provider and then their own data API?
17. If everything works really well for Pinwheel over the next five years, what do you become and how is the world different as a result of your existence?